Know all ye by these presents that Annie Machon is hereby honored with the traditional Sam Adams Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder, in symbolic recognition of her courage in shining light into dark places.
“If you see something, say something.” Long before that saying came into vogue, Annie Machon took its essence to heart.
MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, recognized how bright, enterprising, and unflappable Annie was and recruited her as soon as she completed her studies at Cambridge.
The good old boys in MI5 apparently thought she would have a malleable conscience, as well — such that she would have no qualms about secret monitoring of the very government officials overseeing MI5 itself, for example.
Annie would not be quiet about this secret abuse. Her partner, David Shayler, an MI5 colleague and — like Annie — a person of integrity and respect for law, became aware of an MI6 plan to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
They decided to blow the whistle and fled to France. (Many years later, a woman of high station but more flexible integrity openly gloated over Gaddafi’s brutal assassination.)
After three years on the lam, hiding mostly in France, they returned to the UK, where Annie was arrested (but never charged with a crime). The powers-that-be, however, chose to make an example of Shayler (not unlike what they are now doing to Julian Assange).
Shayler’s whistleblowing case dragged on for seven years, during which he did a brief stint in the infamous high-security prison where Julian Assange still rots (having been denied bail, yet again). A strong mitigation plea by Annie helped reduce Shayler’s remaining prison time. All in all, though, what he was forced to endure took a hard toll on him.
More broadly, the issues that surfaced around whistleblowing at the time remain largely the same two decades later. Annie Machon has been a very prominent and strong supporter of Julian. She has also been a much admired mentor to less experienced women and men as they seek to become better informed on issues of integrity and courage, and take Annie up on her offer to “help them meet interesting people”, as she puts it.
We would be remiss today were we not to call to mind the courageous example of our first two awardees, Coleen Rowley (FBI) and Katharine Gun (GCHQ), who took great risks in exposing malfeasance and in trying to head off the attack on Iraq. And, as Julian Assange did when he won this award, we again honor his treasured source, Chelsea Manning, for her continuing courage and scarcely believable integrity.
Ed Snowden, our Sam Adams awardee in 2013, noted that we tend to ignore some degree of evil in our daily life, but, as Ed put it, “We also have a breaking point and when people find that, they act.”
Annie is still acting, as one can see as this World Ethical Data Forum unfolds.
Presented this 17th day of March at the World Ethical Data Forum by admirers of the example set by the late CIA analyst, Sam Adams.
Related Articles
Holocaust, Immolation, Sacrifice and “An Extreme Act of Protest”
Aaron Bushnell: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” Daniel Berrigan: “Jesus’ death, I think, in a very deep sense can be called a self-immolation.”
https://husseini.substack.com/p/holocaust-immolation-sacrifice-and
FEB 25, 2025
[Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., a year ago today. A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of The Capitol Hill Citizen — which is only available in print. Past writing in the Citizen: “The Ostrich Caucus — Why won’t members of Congress just say it: Israel has nukes?” and “Democrats Look the Other Way on Pandemic Origins: Will Hoped-for Republican Inquiry be Limited?”]
On the morning of October 14, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Israel launched an airstrike on a crowded tent encampment for displaced individuals near Al-Aqsa [Jerusalem] hospital in Gaza, engulfing the area in a massive fire. Footage from the scene revealed patients, some bedridden and connected to IVs, being burned alive while others in the camp desperately attempted to put out the flames with small buckets of water.
“I swear to God I saw people burning in front of me. By God, no one could do anything” said Saleh Al-Jafarawi, an independent Palestinian journalist who filmed the massacre said in a video posted on his Instagram account.
Another Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Abubaker Abed, would report that the man immolated by Israel’s bombardment was apparently Sha’ban Al-Dalou, 19, “a software engineering freshman, Sept. 2023, at Al-Azhar [most luminous] University of Gaza. Israel destroyed his home and his university and immolated him yesterday at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after forcibly displacing him earlier last year.” He was burned alive along with his mother; much of the rest of the family sustained burns but are still alive.
The scene led Juan Cole to recall that “The term ‘holocaust’ is derived from the Greek words holos (whole) and kaustos (burned).”
While some Palestinians, struggling to survive in barely functioning hospitals, are burned alive by Israel’s attacks, a few in the US have immolated themselves over the last year in protest of the US-government-backed slaughter.
The prophet Isaiah proclaimed:
The Lord has spoken: …
I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. …
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Still, some are effectively offering the burning not of lambs and goats as a religious tribute, but of their own flesh as a sacrifice for peace.
On Dec. 1, as the Gaza health ministry was reporting 15,000 dead, a “Jane Doe” with a Palestinian flag immolated herself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.
According to the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department, the person is alive and in the hospital, but they would provide no other information about their condition. The fire department report referred to the case as an “arson”.
Like most self-immolators in the US, the case got minimal coverage and what coverage there was was skewed. ABC quoted an Israeli official who pretended they were the victims: “It is tragic to see the hate and incitement toward Israel expressed in such a horrific way.”
Police records indicate that they obtained a search warrant and entered an apartment they believed to be associated with “Jane Doe” — initially using a drone:
The drone was able to relay information as to the layout and the belongings inside. After it was deemed “safe” entry was made with bomb technicians. While clearing the apartment no improvised explosive devices were located.
The report also indicated that the person was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, which has a burn center. Repeated inquiries to Grady, which is a public hospital, went unanswered. The hospital houses the Walter L. Ingram Burn Center.
The police report also noted:
During the search [of the apartment] a Quran was found in the bedroom along with a [sic] Arabic dictionary and a Hebrew dictionary.
When pressed for information in February, the fire department cited an alleged ongoing investigation as the reason for minimal information being provided, but by October, the reason had changed to professed privacy concerns for “Jane Doe.”
On Feb. 25, Aaron Bushnell, as South Africa made an appeal to the International Court of Justice to stop the Israeli attack on Rafah, immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old serviceman of the United States Air Force said: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he said calmly as he walked to the embassy. “But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
He shouted “FREE PALESTINE!” over and over as he burned himself alive in his uniform.
As he burned up, “security” personnel screamed at him to get on the ground. As with the case of “Jane Doe,” he was treated as a threat to others. One officer has a gun drawn on Aaron until after he collapses.
Finally another officer says: “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”
Prior to lighting himself ablaze, Aaron poured liquid from a metal bottle over his head and put on his military cap. He then took out a lighter and struggled to light it.
In advance of his self-sacrifice, Bushnell posted a message on his Facebook page: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Bushnell’s case is unique in that it got substantially more media attention than any other case in the US in decades. This is at least partly due to the fact that he livestreamed it.
For a time, the Israeli embassy was the site of daily protests, with activists placing floral wreaths where Bushnell had immolated himself. [Note: Protests there are apparently starting up again.]
Still, Talia Jane, who first popularized the video of his immolation blurred out the image.
In contrast, the extremely graphic self immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam in 1963 was awarded World Press Photo of the Year.
It has in fact become a staple of “coverage” of the slaughter in Gaza that carnage is often blurred out. Part of the reason for blurring out photos showing Israel’s carnage may be concerns about Big Tech platforms using that as a pretext to target accounts. In Feb 2024, I was suspended for a time from X for posting the award winning photo of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation. But whatever the motivation for the censorship, it effectively anesthetizes the horror of what Israel is doing — and may effectively make the killing more palatable, thus prolonging it. Whatever one might image the “privacy” wishes of people being slaughtered in Palestine to be, Bushnell clearly meant for people to see the horror of his agony.
The immolations in Vietnam inspired Alice Herz, a Quaker feminist pacifist immigrant from Nazi Germany, to immolate herself in Detroit in March of 1965, apparently the first US person to immolate themselves, to little media coverage.
Another Quaker, Norman Morrison, immolated himself in November of the same year while holding his infant daughter, within view of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office. This was amid the burning of draft cards, often organized by the Catholic Worker movement.
A week later, on November 9, 1965 at 5 a.m., Catholic Worker Roger Allen LaPorte assumed the lotus position and set himself alight outside the United Nations. These acts were reportedly celebrated in North Vietnam; a stamp was issued in Morrison’s honor. LaPorte’s death led to somber comments from U Thant, the secretary general of the UN, and the US representative in a front page New York Times story. LaPorte would tell a police offer he did it because he was “against war, all war.”
Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day would avoid media interviews just after the immolation but would write “Suicide or Sacrifice?” calling LaPorte a “victim soul”: “It is not only that many youths and students throughout the country are deeply sensitive to the sufferings of the world. They have a keen sense that they must be responsible and make a profession of their faith that things do not have to go on as they always have — that men are capable of laying down their lives for others, taking a stand, even when the all-encroaching State and indeed all the world are against them.”
Several people immolated themselves in protest of the prolonged war against Iraq over the years, but were almost completely ignored, showing that the clichés that the media seek sensationalism and “if it bleeds it leads” are not true when they challenge the establishment’s agenda.
One — Gregory Levey — was the stepson of the columnist Ellen Goodman. After the February 1991 bombing of the Amariyah Shelter, which killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians, he walked to the Amherst, Massachusetts, town common with newspapers stuffed under his clothing. He doused himself with paint thinner. The first match went out. With the second, he lit himself afire.
At least two others immolated themselves trying to stop the 1991 bombing of Iraq, Raymond Moules and Timothy T. Brown, who said: “I, Tim Brown, Vietnam veteran, declare that my act of self-immolation is a direct protest of American war policy in the Middle East.” I found no coverage of them at all, only learning of their names years later from Brian Willson, author of Blood on the Tracks, who lost his legs being run over by a train in 1987 which he tried to stop from sending weapons to Nicaragua. He wrote to me: “One could argue that immolations are like distressed canaries … We live in a pathological culture operating as a criminal psychopath, way out of control headed for annihilation.”
Similarly, in November 2006 musician Malachi Ritscher immolated himself in Chicago. “Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state” he wrote. “When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. … Half the population is taking medication … The violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter, if the human race lasts that long.” I recall being appalled by the lack of media coverage of Ritscher’s death. Even programs like Democracy Now wouldn’t mention it.
In contrast, the 2011 Arab uprisings were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit seller, who immolated himself in front of a government building in Tunisia. While Bouaziz lay in the hospital, he lived for some time before finally dying, people in Tunisia could hear their neighbors shouting from their windows “Dignity! Dignity!” at 2:00 a.m.
Many others in Tunisia and other Arab countries followed, hoping their sacrifice would create a better life for others around them.
This year, a man immolated himself in front of a palace in Jordan, apparently in protest of Jordan’s complicity in the slaughter in Gaza, but his name has not been revealed.
There were reports of self immolations in Gaza in 2018, but again, no names.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says of self-immolation: “I think we must try to understand those who have sacrificed themselves. We do not intend to say that self-immolation is good, or that it is bad. … When you say something is good, you say that you should do that. But nobody can urge another to do such a thing. … It is done to wake us up.” He relates the story of a young Vietnamese woman, Nhat Chi Mai, who immolated herself — and was so joyous the month before that people thought she was planning on getting married. He also argues that others are burning themselves but [quoting another monk] “in a slower way. I am burning myself with austerity, with active resistance against the war.” In some ways, self-immolation is an attempt at a life of service all at once. We are all oxidizing slowly, they chose it all at once.
On Sept. 11, Matt Nelson, a few days after the Israeli military shot US citizen Ayşenur Eygi in the head as she observed a protest on the West Bank, immolated himself across from the Israeli consulate in Boston.
He used some of the same language as Bushnell in a video he posted shortly before immolating himself: “My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We call ourselves the greatest nation in history yet we spend more on weapons of war than we do on educating our children, helping the homeless, ensuring all Americans have equal rights, and protecting the environment combined. We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care.
“The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government. I urge any of you who are of the same mind to call your senators and representatives and demand that they introduce and advanced legislation to achieve these goals. If sitting lawmakers won’t, vote for those who will the democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interest of the wealthy take the power back. Free Palestine.”
The media attention to his immolation was trivial. And the Boston police effectively hindered any reporting on it, falsely telling me on Sept. 18 that he was still alive when he had died on Sept. 15.
An accidental witness to Nelson’s self-immolation posted on X: “It was awful to see him on fire, not fighting against the flames or screaming for help. He was just enduring the pain!”
The Cape Cod Times would eventually report: “Nelson, 45, lived in Centerville and Hyannis for much of his life, and attended Centerville Elementary School and Barnstable High School, according to a long-time friend Owen Flood.”
Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the local group the Muslim Justice League organized a vigil at the Boston Public Garden to raise awareness surrounding why Nelson self-immolated.
On Oct. 6, at a rally near the White House as part of the protests against a year of genocide by Israel, Samuel Mena Jr immolated his arm.
With a press ID draping from his neck, Mena, who went to Walter Cronkite School in Phoenix and worked at TV stations in Arizona shouted, “Free Palestine!”, and “I’m a journalist and I’m ashamed! We spread the misinformation!”
He wrote in a piece posted the day before: “The Biden-Harris administration said it wanted to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza in February AND YET, as of August, Israel has received 50.5 Billion dollars in Military aid and sales since October 7th, which is an outdated figure by this point. AND YET, when votes were held at the UN for a resolution to call for a ceasefire to war-torn Gaza, the US used its veto power on three separate occasions. …
“Democracy is dead. America looked in the dead eyes of the British Colonialism that we once opposed in an effort to create this nation, and instead decided to revive it. …
“To the 10 thousand children in Gaza that have lost a limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you. I pray my voice was able to raise up yours, and that your smiles never disappear.”
The notion of martyrdom seems at odds with a modern age to some even though Christianity and the U.S. were arguably built on it.
Patrick Henry declared “Give me liberty or give me death.”
But many immolators seem to view immolation as a form of protest when normal forms of democratic process seem futile. A refusal to live in permanent subjugation — a liberty though death — and a hope that by exiting that subjugation though death, a dignified life might be achieved for others who one loves.
Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan would comment “I think in Christianity that something very great has been lost. … Jesus’ death, I think, in a very deep sense can be called a self-immolation.”
Indeed, the origin of the word “immolation” are apparently of sacrifice, in the writing of martyr Thomas More, the patron saint of statesmen and politicians.
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist writing at husseini.substack.com. He is also founder of VotePact.org, which encourages cooperation between the anti-establishment left and right.
Invitation to 2024 Sam Adams Award Ceremony on Nov. 2 in Washington D.C.
All are invited to the 21st annual Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award ceremony to be given in memoriam to Aaron Bushnell, in recognition of his remarkable action in taking his own life to alert the world to the terrible crime of the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza, which has now spread to the West Bank and Lebanon.
It is hoped that US and UN officials who have spoken out and/or resigned/retired as a result of their opposition to and the deceit surrounding the ongoing genocide of Palestinians will attend as our honored guests.
Our Sam Adams award ceremony and reception is scheduled to be held from 7-9 pm on Saturday evening, November 2, at the Busboys and Poets Restaurant event rooms, 450 K St. NW, Washington D.C.
The event is sponsored by the Eisenhower Media Network.
Make your reservation at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sam-adams-award-ceremonyreception-honoring-aaron-bushnell-in-memoriam-tickets-1047960426847?aff=oddtdtcreator and more info at: https://www.busboysandpoets.com/events/th-evt-43719520/
The award ceremony will be livestreamed at:
https://www.facebook.com/N2Sreports
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbBm6SZ235HFxwVKC7Po5IA and
US Soldier Who Burned Himself to Death Over Gaza Wins Sam Adams Associates Award for Integrity in Intelligence
In presenting its 2024 award, the Sam Adams Associates says it salutes Aaron Bushnell’s courage in performing a vital public service at the greatest cost — martyrdom — for truth-telling. (published in Consortiumnews on Sept 19, 2024)
Vigil on Feb. 27, 2024, outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington for Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. airman who self-immolated to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A notice from the Sam Adams Associates:
The Sam Adams Associates are pleased to announce United States Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell as the recipient of the 2024 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
Bushnell was a cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. He was assigned to the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Fort Meade in Maryland.
Senior Airman (SRA) Bushnell martyred himself when he walked up to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, while streaming himself as he approached, and then self-immolated in protest of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, the most extreme form of protest. He was 25 years old and had been on active duty since May 2020, according to the service.
He had stated as he approached the embassy:
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
In an earlier on-line post, later identified as from SRA Bushnell, he’d written: “I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
In advance of his burning, Bushnell posted this message on his Facebook page:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
As he was consumed by flames, SRA Bushnell’s last words were, “Free Palestine,” said repeatedly.
This was not an act of suicide, as some would have us believe, though SRA Bushnell acted out of despair of any other means of protest having an effect in stopping Israeli genocide and U.S. complicity in that. He obviously suffered the moral injury that so many U.S. service members suffer from when they come to realize their role in, as SRA Bushnell put it: “I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
Feb. 26, 2024: A vigil in Washington for Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force who self-immolated outside the Israel embassy to avoid being complicit in genocide. (Elvert Barnes, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
But in SRA Bushnell’s case, his actions made him a “Whistleblower,” in the finest tradition of many of the other Sam Adams Awardees, in that he was acting in opposition to what the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli government describe as “Cognitive Warfare.”
Or the “Battle for Consciousness,” of the world’s population, which accompanies Israel’s illegal treatment of the Palestinians being held under illegal military occupation, in denial of that illegality. Here is how it is described in an Israeli book on that “Battle for Consciousness,” or “Public Diplomacy”:
“The IDF speaks about consciousness: ‘The strategy of limited conflict is to win a decision of ‘consciousness in the society with the help of military means. The battle is for the society’s consciousness and for national resilience. Decision is achieved through maneuvering to raise doubts and generate a sense of persistent uncertainty.’”
Senior Airman Bushnell seriously upset the preferred narrative in Israel’s so-called “Public Diplomacy,” or more correctly, “Cognitive Warfare” as the “Battle for Consciousness.”
In that, in his opposition to genocide, SRA Bushnell was acting in the finest tradition of past U.S. heroes who took it upon themselves to undertake missions knowing the only possible outcome was certain death, in sacrificing their life for a noble purpose.
That’s not “suicide.” It’s martyrdom, in the spirit of the most exalted people in history.
Perhaps inspired by Sr. Airman Bushnell, numerous other government employees have sacrificed their careers in protest of Israel’s genocide and U.S. complicity in that. We honor all of them too, with this Award, though presented in Aaron Bushnell’s name.
The Sam Adams Associates wish to salute the courage of Aaron Bushnell in performing a vital public service at the greatest cost — martyrdom — for truth-telling.
We urge an end to U.S. complicity in the ongoing Israeli genocide taking place before the world’s eyes, and legal accountability for all engaged in that genocide, Israeli and American. To that end, the public’s right to know about their government’s wrongful actions — including the adverse consequences of policies carried out in their name — must be respected and preserved.
SRA Bushnell is the 21st awardee of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. His distinguished colleagues include Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange and Craig Murray, who have all paid heavy prices for truth-telling.
But Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell voluntarily paid the highest price, a price we wish no one to pay. But in endless U.S. wars “in the violent domination of the world,” we must expect our service members to feel the righteous despair that Aaron Bushnell wrote of: “I will never get the blood off my hands.”
Other fellow Sam Adams Award alumnae include NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake; F.B.I. 9-11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, whose story was recounted in the film Official Secrets.
Sam Adams was a C.I.A. whistleblower who exposed the U.S. official lie about the strength of Viet Cong forces.
The full roster of Sam Adams awardees is available at samadamsaward.ch.
Tags: Aaron Bushnell Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence
A Celebration of Daniel Ellsberg
JOE LAURIA: Memories of Dan Ellsberg
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
I first met Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday at 92, inside a House committee hearing room on Capitol Hill in 2006. It was a hearing about whistleblowers. We were both sitting towards the back of the sparsely attended room.
I don’t recall how we began speaking, but I had just returned from a trip to Vietnam and Dan voraciously questioned me about my experiences there. He wanted to know if I thought the motive for U.S. involvement had been economic or purely ideological. He didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. But that apparently was of no consequence to him.
Among his many supremely, human traits was that as a man as famous as he had become, he didn’t succumb to the awful, unapproachable egoism that well-known people can bestow on themselves. There are many journalists speaking or writing now about their experiences with Dan. That’s because he was open to any serious person who had a curiosity about the things that intensely interested him.
Later that year, in 20o6, I was invited to a 35th anniversary dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to commemorate the passing of the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg to Senator Mike Gravel in 1971.
I only briefly spoke with Dan that night, but a year later I had a book contract to tell Gravel’s story. Mike had become a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Dan agreed to write the foreword to the book (and pointed out how many people mistakenly called it a “forward” instead of “foreword”). As he was a major part of Gravel’s story I interviewed him for the book.
During one interview I was on the phone with Dan in an empty Amtrak train headed to Washington. In the distance, at the other end of the car, a guy was standing who looked exactly like the arch-neocon Bill Kristol. I told Dan. He said, “If you talk to him tell him ‘Fuck you from Dan Ellsberg.” But we returned to the interview.
I regret not going up to the guy to ask him if he was Kristol. If he was, I would have handed him the phone and told him I have Dan Ellsberg on the line and he has something he wants to tell you. (I especially regret it after John Kiriakou’s story in CN about Ellsberg.)
Dan Ellsberg, Whitney Stewart Gravel with Mike Gravel at 35th anniversary of the transfer of the Pentagon Papers, June 2006. (Joe Lauria)
Ellsberg told me he had gone in 1971 to several senators, including George McGovern, who was running for president, asking them to read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record because they had constitutional immunity. They all chickened out.
Dan told me he initially thought that if a senator read the Papers in Congress then the newspapers would report on it, and what he was revealing would become known. But then he figured out it happens the other way around: the Senate actually reacts to the press, not the press to the Senate.
So he leaked the Papers to The New York Times. After just two days, the Nixon Department of Justice shut down publication on June 15, 1971. The Times had published very little of the 7,000-page study in the two days before the injunction. On the very next day, Ellsberg arranged to send the Papers to Gravel, the only senator who had the guts to take them and read them into the record.
Cover of A Political Odyssey, 2008. (Seven Stories Books)
Ellsberg had learned that Gravel was conducting a filibuster to stop renewal of the military draft and he called Gravel, asking him if he wanted a copy of the Pentagon Papers.
They made an arrangement whereby Ellsberg, who was hiding out from the F.B.I. in a motel in Cambridge, MA, gave copies of the Papers, bound by a dog’s leash, to Ben Bagdikian, then an editor at The Washington Post. One copy was for the Post and one for Gravel.
Bagdikian, who said he felt uncomfortable as a journalist being a messenger to a U.S. senator, bought two seats on a flight from Boston to Washington. One seat was for him, and the other for the Papers.
Bagdikian and Gravel met in front of the Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House, where they transferred the Papers from Bagdikian’s car to Gravel’s. Then they went inside to have a drink, as Gravel told me, as though nothing special had happened.
Gravel then spent days cutting off “Top Secret” from each page. Ellsberg surrendered at a federal courthouse in Boston on June 28, 1971. The next day Gravel brought the Papers onto the Senate floor to read them as part of his filibuster. A suspicious Republican senator figured Gravel he was up to something, seeing a big flight bag next to his desk.
In fact one Democratic senator, Ed Muskie, came over and jokingly asked Gravel on the Senate floor, “What the hell do you have there Mike, the Pentagon Papers?” And indeed he did.
But the Republican senator called for a quorum vote and it failed. So Gravel went to plan B and convened a hearing in the Capitol basement. There he read the Papers over several hours on national TV, broke down in tears, and put the rest into the record.
The next morning the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the DOJ’s prior restraint and publication in the newspapers resumed.
It was from Ellsberg that I learned the little known fact that the Nixon DOJ empaneled a grand jury in Boston to prosecute New York Times reporters under the Espionage Act for publishing the top secret material (just as the Trump and now the Biden administration is trying to do to Assange.)
The grand jury collapsed when it became known that the F.B.I. had wiretapped Ellsberg’s phones, meaning the government had also listened in on the Times reporters. That was part of the prosecutorial misconduct that led to a mistrial of Ellsberg’s Espionage Act prosecution and to his freedom.
In 2018 I interviewed Ellsberg and Gravel about these events:
In the foreword to my book with Gravel, Ellsberg wrote this about where he got his courage from:
“At the height of the Vietnam War, in the late summer of 1969, I met young American draft resisters who were on their way to prison. Their example put the question in my mind: ‘What could I do to help end this war if I’m ready to go to prison for it?’ If they could do this, I thought, I could do it. That kind of courage was contagious.’”
A man who had made a supreme sacrifice to put his own freedom at risk to save countless lives still blamed himself.
“I had participated in a terrible, indecent fraud in Vietnam that had lied us into continuing and escalating a hopeless and wrongful war — something that was reproduced when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 and could happen again in Iran if we do not stop it now. I thought, in the fall of 1969, that by exposing the secret history of Vietnam, it might help to get us out of that terrible war.”
Because he felt he hadn’t acted fast enough, when no one else had acted at all (except for his partner Anthony Russo, who was also put on trial), Ellsberg had something to say to officials in Washington who had left files on Iraq un-leaked before the 2003 invasion.
“My message to such officials is this: ‘Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until the war has begun and the engine of war is unstoppable. Before the war or the next escalation, consider accepting the personal risk of exposing lies and revealing the truth to the public through the press and the Congress, with documents.’”
It was a message Dan repeated many times, including when he was awarded the Sam Adams prize on April 11 at Dan’s home in California. “Do what I wish I had done in ’64, not what I waited till ’69 and ’71 to do. Act like Katharine Gun and Ed Snowden and Tom Drake, Bill Binney, and many others on the list of Sam Adams awardees, in particular, Ed Snowden and Julian Assange,” he said (video).
When other men might tire of life, Dan persevered until the end in his defense of whistleblowers like Tom Drake, who warned about illegal mass surveillance at the NSA; Edward Snowden, who leaked the files proving it; John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the C.I.A. torture program; and Chelsea Manning, who made the Iraq and Afghan war files as well as the Diplomatic Cables available to WikiLeaks.
Ellsberg spoke out into his ninth decade. He wrote four important books, wrote countless articles, appeared at protests (where he was arrested several times), on television and webcasts, including numerous times on Consortium News‘ CN Live!, where he defended the only publisher and journalist ever charged under the Espionage Act — Julian Assange.
When I reported the testimony from Spanish witnesses read in Assange’s extradition hearing in September 2020, revealing for the first time that the C.I.A. had plotted to kidnap or poison Assange, Dan sent me a message expressing cautious optimism, saying this was worse than what had happened to him during his case, which led to a mistrial and his freedom. On Oct. 1, 2020, he wrote in an email:
“These sworn allegations, by expert witnesses, if true (they reported being able to supply voluminous documentary and video evidence) imply that the CIA in the Trump Administrations carried out crimes — including illegal surveillance (in this case, of Assange’s interactions with his lawyers) and consideration of poisoning him in the Ecuador Embassy — which correspond closely to the Nixon administration crimes against me whose exposure during my trial led to dismissal of charges against me and Tony Russo, and to impeachment hearings that forced Nixon’s resignation.
So far, these explosive revelations (like the whole four weeks of testimony) remain uncovered by the NYT and the Washington Post (one AP story a day late). (Wild contrast to the press reaction to exactly comparable revelations toward the end of my trial 47 years ago). Historic. What comes of them…is a major test (alongside all the others) of the state of our republic today.”’
He then sat for this interview with us on the topic:
With the prospect of Assange’s extradition to the U.S. as early as this week, this test of the state of the U.S. republic appears to be failing miserably. In the days or weeks before he may be sent to face espionage charges for revealing U.S. war crimes, Julian Assange has now lost his most prominent and fiercest advocate.
And the world has lost one of its greatest advocates for peace.
Dan appeared on our show numerous other times to discuss Assange. He also sat down with GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun on CN Live! on Sep. 27, 2019, shortly after the release of Official Secrets, a feature film about Gun’s leaking of documents showing how the U.S. was spying on members of the U.N. Security Council to pressure them for their vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq. It was an effort that failed.
In March 2019, I visited Dan in his Bay Area home with its spectacular view of the bay. We talked in depth about the Espionage Act as I was working on a piece about it in relation to the Official Secrets Act and Assange.
We also disagreed about the Mueller investigation and whether it had conclusively proved that Russia hacked the DNC. (Since the WikiLeaks publications of those documents, not oral statements, were totally accurate, it was information about the election that was being spread, not disinformation. Thus ultimately, the source is irrelevant.) I disagreed with Dan that Mueller had proven anything, given that his indictment would never be tested in court.
Dan was a loyal Democrat, on the left-wing of the party to be sure. But since the 1990s it has no longer been FDR’s party, moving to the center-right. Since 2016, neocons have migrated there from the Republican Party. I was disappointed that Dan, like Noam Chomsky, did not take a stand against both parties, particularly on foreign policy, where they are indistinguishable in their promotion of war to further U.S. imperial interests — something Dan certainly opposed.
The last time I saw Dan — not on a computer screen — was at a birthday dinner in Maryland in 2019. He virtually cornered me in the kitchen, where I was attempting to eat some of the leftovers, trying to convince me the U.S. had a two-party system and there was no choice but to support the Democrats.
He was uncomfortable being a “hero,” because he believed he just did what he was supposed to do, and especially because more recent whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden were considered traitors.
Because he put the vital subjects that mattered most to him before himself — nuclear weapons, illegal surveillance, the First Amendment or Julian Assange — it was never about Dan Ellsberg. For him it was about the issues threatening the republic, indeed even humanity.
That stood out starkly in this increasingly narcissistic, social-media age. He was kind and unassuming and accepted anyone into his orbit who had a legitimate thing to say. And that is why it was such a privilege for me, as for countless others, to have known him.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe