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whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg: A Friend and Peacemaker Who Did So Much More Than Leak the Pentagon Papers
“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969,” Dan wrote on March 1st, “I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War. Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.”
“What's more,” he continued, “I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and nonviolent resistance.”
Dan now lives on with the God of peace and all the great prophets of peace.
Dan’s death at age 92 has made headlines around the world, not only because of the Pentagon Papers and the lies he exposed about the horrific Vietnam War, but because his daring act led to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold freedom of the press and then further revelations of Nixon’s other crimes and ultimately his resignation.
But for many of us who labor for peace and disarmament, it’s the fifty years of peace activism that followed the release of the Pentagon Papers that has been so inspiring. I’ve known Dan personally for over thirty-five years, and I can attest that he never once let up his passionate writing, speaking, and demonstrating for an end to war and nuclear weapons. He was one of the most passionate anti-war truth-tellers not just in U.S. history, but in all of history.
A week before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced his definition of hope as “the final refusal to give up.” In that spirit, Dan Ellsberg was one of the most hopeful, persistent peacemakers in the world.
Dan would be the first to acknowledge the influence of the growing anti-war movement for his decision to release the 7,000 pages outlining the history of U.S. warmaking in Vietnam. It was Randy Kehler’s speech at the 1969 War Resisters League conference that turned Dan around.
Randy announced to the small crowd that he was about to head off to prison for refusing to be drafted. After hearing his speech, Dan went to the nearest men’s room, sat down on the floor and sobbed uncontrollably for one hour. If this young man could go to prison to stop this war, what am I going to do? he asked himself.
He knew that he faced life imprisonment, and might even be killed for releasing the papers, but the steadfast resistance of young people like Randy Kehler inspired him to risk his own career and life. There’s an important lesson here: we may never know the outcome of our public work for peace and how it might touch others in unexpected ways, but we can trust the God of peace, resist war, speak the truth, and do what’s right simply because it’s right and true, and know that, despite the odds, the God of peace can use us to build a tidal wave of opposition that can stop a war and change the world.
I saw Dan many times over the decades and was arrested with him at various anti-nuclear protests. Last year, while visiting him and his family for a day in Berkeley, I reminded him of a moment that has stayed with me.
“There’s nothing to thank me for yet. You and I have to keep working for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. That’s what I want and what I intend to do till the day I die if necessary.”
It was 1995 and Dan and I were holding a press conference to network news reporters on the steps of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That afternoon, we had met with the head of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., and officials from the “Air and Space Museum.” We asked them to change the script that was about to be unveiled at the new display of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima fifty years earlier. We argued passionately that, contrary to the Smithsonian’s conclusion that the U.S. atomic bombings “saved lives,” instead, it killed some two hundred thousand people and was done to prove our military superiority over the Russians. It led directly to the development of the nuclear arms race which continues to threaten the planet today. Eventually, we persuaded the Smithsonian to drop its entire display, which they had spent ten years and millions of dollars preparing.
After our press conference, I turned to Dan and thanked him for his help to stop the revisionist lie about Hiroshima. He looked me in the eye and said, “No, John, there’s nothing to thank me for yet. You and I have to keep working for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. That’s what I want and what I intend to do till the day I die if necessary.” I was profoundly moved and inspired by his determination, and witnessed him speak out for the urgent need to abolish nuclear weapons right up until the end. He took a turn last week just as he was preparing to be interviewed for 60 Minutes.
Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023) pictured with his friend, Rev. John Dear.(Photo: Courtesy of John Dear)
“I wish I could report greater success for our efforts,” Dan wrote on March 1st. “As I write, ‘modernization’ of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas--like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen.”
“China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war--let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out--are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere.”
“As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts,” he concluded. What a profound statement! Many national leaders have said that Daniel Ellsberg was one of the smartest persons on the planet, and so it is noteworthy that this brilliant man insists that the best way we can spend our lives is to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
But Dan didn’t stop there. Instead of lamenting his personal predicament, he went on at length in his last letter to lament our global predicament—one that we never hear anyone talk about: the impending catastrophic threat of a nuclear winter.
“For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth. So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon's nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats.”
Dan’s two mammoth best-selling memoirs, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, should be required reading for every American. Yes, he is the father of all whistle-blowers, and his support of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden should push us all to do likewise. Yes, his public efforts to help end the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were critically helpful in breaking through the silence, as were his regular talks and periodic civil disobedience in our campaign to close Livermore Laboratories near the Bay Area.
But I think Dan was far greater than he has been portrayed in the mainstream media. To me, Dan was a holy prophet. He was like Isaiah, calling us to “beat swords into plowshares and study war no more.” He was like Ezekiel, describing the nightmarish vision of a field of dry bones. He was like Jonah walking across the great city of Nineveh, criss-crossing the U.S., calling Americans to repent of the mortal sin of war and nuclear preparations, and to give our lives like him in a new global grassroots peace movement for the abolition of war itself and a new culture of peace and nonviolence. Unlike the people of Nineveh, we Americans have not heeded his call; nevertheless, it is not yet too late to repent.
As I mourn my friend and celebrate his peacemaking life, my thoughts turn to those unheralded brave souls who continue his effort to uphold the vision of nuclear disarmament.
In this historical moment when we have so little leadership, so little vision, so little courage, Dan Ellsberg was the real thing. He offered the prophetic vision, voice and leadership that we desperately needed. He pointed a way back from the brink of permanent warfare and nuclear destruction toward the sanity of peace and nonviolence. Despite what he said of himself, his was a devoutly religious life for he gave himself every day to the cause of truth, peace and the fullness of life for all.
His visionary leadership and prophetic voice for peace should be the norm for every U.S. priest and bishop, and yet it is almost entirely absent—except of course for Bishop Tom Gumbleton, Bishop John Stowe, and Archbishop John Wester who last year published his great pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.”
As I mourn my friend and celebrate his peacemaking life, my thoughts turn to those unheralded brave souls who continue his effort to uphold the vision of nuclear disarmament. Today, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has helped sixty eight nations to sign the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Last week, I joined a zoom with Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts who has launched the first serious bill in Congress (H Res 77) to get the United States on track to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and sign the UN ban treaty. I urge everyone to join this campaign (led by “Back from the Brink”) and publicize this great effort. (www.preventnuclearwar.org).
Dan now lives on with the God of peace and all the great prophets of peace. May the rest of us heed his cry, repent of our nuclear violence like the people of Nineveh, and welcome God’s gift of peace. Thank you, Daniel Ellsberg, as Hopkins would say, for “brute beauty and valor and act.” Pray for us who remain that we too might persist, come what may and do our part to abolish war and nuclear weapons forever. Amen.
Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking -- It's an Act of Political Resistance
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn't have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)
We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting -- in other words, in a way that empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that "state secrets" are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won't always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as "cutting the grass.")
A single act of whistleblowing doesn't change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society -- if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice -- they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.
Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.
Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president's private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he'd be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who's Who of the Deep State.
There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a CIA officer's name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly "damaging to national security" under the definitions of our law.
This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda "conference call of doom" story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific communications they had intercepted, including locations of the participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the officials' claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al Qaeda hotline.
If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?
The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it's not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the disparate components of the institution -- not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body -- must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we're talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can't guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world's unmentionables -- including your own -- begins to look more like a liability than an asset.
Truly unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act of resistance -- that is, if they're not done simply for press consumption, to fluff up the public appearance or reputation of an institution. However, that doesn't mean they all come from the lowest working level. Sometimes the individuals who step forward happen to be near the pinnacle of power. Ellsberg was in the top tier; he was briefing the secretary of defense. You can't get much higher, unless you are the secretary of defense, and the incentives simply aren't there for such a high-ranking official to be involved in public interest disclosures because that person already wields the influence to change the policy directly.
At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer when they were publicly making statements like "We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever," and everybody still thought that was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do precisely that. I wasn't briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense, but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency's director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.
Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That's a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.
I've argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It's not a virtue of who you are or your background. It's a question of what you are exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information, even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.
This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it's critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.
Change has to flow from the bottom to the top.
At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing event -- and by "radical" I don't mean "extreme"; I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. At some point you recognize that you can't just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can't simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about the structural risk to their career. They're concerned about rocking the boat and "getting a reputation." The incentives aren't there to produce meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom to the top.
As someone who works in the intelligence community, you've given up a lot to do this work. You've happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions. You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It's a just cause.
And when you're confronted with evidence -- not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program -- that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you've sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?
One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the context of the United States as the "uncontested hyperpower." We now have the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and it's backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today's context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they think it's an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don't see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats.
What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism -- of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously -- than they are of the crime itself.
As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, "Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained."
When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath -- not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you're asked to participate in.
These disclosures about the Obama administration's killing program reveal that there's a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.
Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we've always understood that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there's no room for a judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided -- without the public's participation, without our knowledge and consent -- that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don't represent an imminent threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the subversion of language, to meet that definition.
Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you're tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it's not American.
By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they're in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it's so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won't be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.
Unrestrained power may be many things, but it's not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.
The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they're willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.
And there are more of us than there are of them.
From The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, with a foreword by Edward Snowden and afterword by Glenn Greenwald, published by Simon & Schuster.
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