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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:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pPPDl04-Cic%3Ffeature%3Doembed

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.  

https://youtube.com/watch?v=csJJWZKxLOE%3Fstart%3D29%26feature%3Doembed

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:  

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7uo4Es7ozKg%3Ffeature%3Doembed

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNck0rrM9xM%3Fstart%3D47%26feature%3Doembed

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     

JOHN KIRIAKOU: The Godfather of Whistleblowers

When the author blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program in 2007, Daniel Ellsberg called to congratulate him and say he had friends at his side. Years later, at a red-carpet event in Hollywood, the “most dangerous man in America” showed what he meant.

Daniel Ellsberg in 2008. (Christopher Michel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News (https://consortiumnews.com/2023/06/21/john-kiriakou-the-godfather-of-whistleblowers/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=d59d115b-1894-4a7a-85aa-0bd0313c467a)

Like so many Americans, I was heartbroken last week to learn of the death of my friend, mentor and personal hero, Daniel Ellsberg.

Dan was a giant of modern American history. He was the godfather of national security whistleblowers. And he was a patriot who wanted nothing more than to ensure transparency, truth and the rule of law within government.

Much will be made of Dan’s contribution to these ideals. He selflessly told the American people that the government was lying to them about the Vietnam War despite knowing that he could have spent the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary for his truth telling.

He embraced Henry Kissinger’s hateful admonition that he was “the most dangerous man in America.” He worked hard to oppose the notorious Espionage Act as unconstitutionally broad and vague. And he supported other national security whistleblowers with everything he had.

I would like to talk about the Dan Ellsberg I knew, the one who was my friend.

When I was a child growing up in western Pennsylvania, my family always had dinner together. My parents were both elementary school teachers, current events were important to them and they would talk about the news of the day every evening over dinner.

I was 7 years old in 1971 when Dan released the Pentagon Papers, and I distinctly remember my father saying, “Daniel Ellsberg is a hero in this house.”

In Mrs. Levine’s second- grade class, we were asked one day who, other than our parents, we admired most. Most of the kids said President Richard Nixon. A couple said George McGovern. I said Daniel Ellsberg.

When I blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program in December 2007, Dan was one of the first people to call to congratulate me.

It was the first time we had ever met; over the phone. I had no idea that he even knew who I was. His call could not have come at a better time.

The C.I.A. had reported me to the F.B.I. for revealing classified information to the media, just as had happened to Dan, and I had been receiving death threats from crazy people from coast to coast.

I still remember the thrill of speaking with somebody who had been a lifelong hero. Dan advised that some days would be dark, but that I shouldn’t forget that I had friends and that they would stand with me. I lived by those words over the next several years.

Ellsberg in 2013, at the San Francisco Pride Parade. (Moizsyed, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In early 2012 I was finally arrested and charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for conversations that I had had with The New York Times and ABC News about the C.I.A.’s torture program.

As I was facing 45 years in prison, Dan was again among the first to call. He stayed in close touch for the 13 months between my arrest and the day that I left to begin what turned out to be a sentence of 23 months in prison.

While I was imprisoned he was a regular correspondent, sending books about protest, truth telling and the Vietnam War, and signing each letter “Love, Dan.” In every single letter, he asked me how my children were doing.

PEN Awards Gala

In 2016, I was honored with the PEN USA First Amendment Award for my second book. The award ceremony was held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, and in attendance were 600 of the most important entertainment attorneys, writers, producers and directors in Hollywood.

[Related: CIA Whistleblower Kiriakou Honored]

Kate McKinnon in 2018. (ColliderVideo – Vimeo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

The PEN First Amendment Award is one of the Big Four literary awards, along with the PEN Faulkner, the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allan Poe, so it was a very big deal for me.

I called Dan immediately to tell him the good news, and much to my surprise, he said that he would also attend the ceremony to accept an honorary award on Ed Snowden’s behalf. We made plans to sit at the same table.

The evening could not have been more exciting. There was a red carpet where photographers from the Associated Press, Getty Images, People Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times took pictures of awardees.

Dan and I posed for one together for the first time. We also took pictures with the night’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Francis Ford Coppola, the famed Oscar-winning director of the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and other masterpieces.

My brother and several of my best friends sat at our table, which was immediately in front of the stage and next to Coppola’s.

The event was on a tight schedule. Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon was the master of ceremonies (she was hilarious), and the PEN people gave out a dozen awards for things like Best Children’s Book, Best Translation and Best Poetry Compilation before getting to the three of us.

Two hours into the ceremony, it was our turn. The PEN folks had asked us to keep our speeches to a tight seven minutes. I almost never rehearse for these things, but I did for this.

I wrote my speech, went over it a hundred times, and got it to a perfect seven minutes. Dan got up on Snowden’s behalf and gave the most eloquent 30-minute speech I’ve ever heard. He was on fire! At the end, he was treated to rousing, thunderous applause.

I was next, and the excitement from Dan’s speech took me from beginning to end before I even realized it was over. I hit the seven-minute mark perfectly, and I was proud of my indictment of the C.I.A.’s torture program.

Finally, it was Coppola’s turn. He walked onto the stage to great applause, took his folded speech out of his jacket pocket, and said into the microphone, “Where’s the C.I.A. guy?” I raised my hand and said, “Right here.”

He continued, “You’re probably a nice guy. But I’m sick and tired of people criticizing my president (Obama)! He’s working as hard as he can!”

Many in the audience began to snicker and clap, thinking that Coppola was launching into a joke. But he wasn’t. He turned to Dan. “You shouldn’t criticize. It only helps the Republicans!”

Dan was hard of hearing for at least the last decade of his life and he wore hearing aids in both ears. The echo in the ballroom made it impossible for him to understand what Coppola was saying.

Dan and I looked at each other and Dan asked, “What is he saying?” I answered, “He’s criticizing us, Dan.” “He’s what?” “He’s criticizing us.”

I didn’t think until that moment that I could be any prouder of Dan Ellsberg, or any prouder to be his friend. He stood up in front of those 600 Hollywood movers and shakers, put both middle fingers in the air and shouted as loudly as he could “Fuck you, Coppola!”

Coppola went silent, looked directly at Dan, and said into the microphone, “That’s it. I’ve said everything I want to say. I don’t want to say any more.” And he walked off the stage. The room was as silent as a church.

Francis Ford Coppola in 2011. (Gerald Geronimo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Kate McKinnon gingerly walked back out onto the stage and said into the microphone, “Well, on that note, drive safely, everybody!”

The PEN people turned the ballroom lights on and made a bee-line for Dan and me.

Meanwhile, the crowd finally realized that this was not a joke. Dozens of them walked up to the table to shake Dan’s hand. The president of PEN USA apologized profusely, saying that they had had no idea that Coppola would react the way he did. I said it wasn’t a problem.

“I’ve been criticized by men far more important than Francis Ford Coppola,” I told them. Dan was fired up. “I don’t have to take that shit from anybody! Even Francis Ford Coppola!”

There was nothing about the incident in the LA Times the next day. My brother opined that Coppola probably had an entire staff of PR people managing his messaging, and two days later, Los Angeles Magazine ran an article saying that “Francis Ford Coppola ditched his remarks following a poignant speech by First Amendment Award recipient John Kiriakou.”

That was it. I didn’t need Los Angeles Magazine or the LA Times or anybody else to explain to me what I had seen, though.

I had seen a giant in action. I had seen a man of the highest integrity unafraid of anybody. I had seen a man who helped to bring down a president of the United States armed with nothing more than the truth.

Over the next several years, Dan and I stayed in touch and even ran into each other at a few dinner parties. He always asked me about my children.

The last time we spoke was a couple of weeks before his passing. He was in a little pain, but he said something that my mom had said in her final few days: “I’m not ready to die. There are still so many things I want to eat.”

He then went into a soliloquy about the most delicious chicken fried rice he had ever had. He was saving the second half of it for after our conversation. And he closed with “love you.”

As I said, I’m heartbroken that the great Daniel Ellsberg is no longer with us. Besides my father and grandfather, only Dan and Pete Seeger had such a positive impact on my life.

Without Dan, national security whistleblowing would have been impossible. There would have been no Ed Snowden, Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale, or John Kiriakou without him.

The entire nation owes him a debt of gratitude. And for me personally, I can say that my life was better with Dan a part of it.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Daniel Ellsberg’s First Leak Helped Prevent War With China

by Ray McGovern Posted on April 12, 2023

Those unaware of Dan Ellsberg’s 2002 Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers may think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was Dan’s first unauthorized disclosure. Not so. Arguably, his first such leak, in March 1968, was even more consequential.

After the Viet Cong shocked most observers by mounting a countrywide offensive in South Vietnam at Tet (late Jan./early Feb. 1968), Dan leaked to the NY Times chapter and verse on how Gen. William Westmoreland had “cooked” intelligence, lowballing data on insurgent strength to create the impression the U.S. was making “remarkable progress” in the war.

The Only Thing Needed: More Troops

Unembarrassed by the Tet offensive, Westmoreland was asking for 206,000 additional troops. Dan knew that and expected President Lyndon Johnson to grant that request. In Secrets Dan writes:

“I wanted to deter him from it. I feared that once he had sent even more troops and called up the reserves, the public and Congress would demand an all-out attack against the North, up to and perhaps beyond the Chinese border. …

“This was what the JCS expected. … Whether or not some of the joint chiefs actually wanted war with China and use of nuclear weapons – I’m not sure on that question to this day – that is what we would be actually risking.

“The striking impact of [an earlier] unauthorized disclosure [in the NY Times on March 10] of the request for 206,000 additional troops – at the time one of the most closely held secrets in the administration – suddenly opened my eyes to my responsibilities as a citizen. I had never considered up till that point leaking classified information” …

“As I observed the effect of this leak, it was as if clouds suddenly opened. I realized something crucial: that the president’s ability to escalate … had depended on secrecy and lying and thus on his ability to deter unauthorized disclosures – truth telling – by officials.”

Sweet Irony

Dan did not find out who the first leaker was; that is, who leaked the Westmoreland request, until after the leaker, Leslie Gelb, died in 2019. Gelb was a senior Pentagon official in 1968. Now, ready for this? It was Gelb who was put in charge of compiling the Pentagon Papers – which were leaked three years later – but this time not by Gelb! He remained in good odor as President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations until he died. Even so, we are indebted to Les Gelb and for the good example (incognito) he gave Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg Wins the Sam Adams Award

At a small gathering today (April 11, 2023) in the Bay area of California, Dan Ellsberg, patron saint of whistleblowers) was presented with the traditional Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder – the “Oscar” accompanying the Sam Adams annual award. Below is the award Citation:

Sam Adams Associates for Integrity

Presented this 11th day of April 2023 in the Berkeley Hills of California by admirers of the integrity of former CIA analyst, Sam Adams.

Know all ye by these presents that Daniel Ellsberg is hereby awarded the Corner-Brightener Candlestick Holder by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity.

Mentor, Mensch, “Most Dangerous Man,” Friend: We honor Dan for setting the standard in exposing government lies and – although he himself never worked for an intelligence agency – for giving unflinching support to intelligence officials who blow the whistle.

Earlier Awardees: From Katharine Gun (2003) to Daniel Hale (2023); from Julian Assange (2010) and Chelsea Manning (2014) to Sy Hersh (2017) – all took courage from Dan and from one another. Ed Snowden (2013), having watched the “Justice” system abuse Tom Drake (2011), decided he had to go abroad in order to expose “turnkey tyranny.” And, citing the patriotic example of Bill Binney (2015), Ed declared: “Without Bill Binney there would be no Ed Snowden.”

Poetic Justice: CIA analyst Sam Adams, for whom this award is named, proved in 1967 that the US Army in Saigon was falsifying the number of armed insurgents in the South. Adams’s count was almost double the 299,000 Gen. William Westmoreland insisted on for political purposes.

Felicitous Leaks: The countrywide insurgent offensive during Tet (Jan/Feb 1968) proved Adams right. Still, President Johnson planned to escalate until leaks to the NY Times thwarted this risky plan. A story by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith, “WESTMORELAND REQUESTS 206,000 MORE MEN, STIRRING DEBATE,” led the Times’s front page on March 10, 1968, revealing plans to widen the war into Cambodia and Laos and noting the increasing opposition to escalation.

The Coup de Grâce: Enter Dan Ellsberg with his very first leak. Dan gave Neil Sheehan the damning data on Westmoreland’s lowball estimates designed to demonstrate “remarkable progress.” On March 19, the Times front-paged Sheehan’s story headlined: “US UNDERVALUED ENEMY’S STRENGTH BEFORE OFFENSIVE: CIA REPORTS FORCES WERE SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER.”

Escalation Thwarted: On March 25 the President complained privately: “The leaks to the NY Times hurt us. …  We have no support for the war. … I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.” On March 31, Johnson paused the bombing and announced he would not run again for president. Westmoreland was pulled out of Saigon and ‘promoted’ to army chief of staff.

Dan Ellsberg has never rested on his laurels. Those who take seriously the danger of nuclear war are also deeply indebted to him for his The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017). That unique book is even more important today than when first published.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

You Needed to Know America’s Ugly Truth

Chelsea Manning/The New York Times

Chelsea Manning. (photo: Lars Hagberg/AFP/Getty Images) (Original Opinion | Chelsea Manning: ‘I’m Still Bound to Secrecy’ – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?

I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.

While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?

The months I spent in Iraq in 2009 changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.

I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”

The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.

I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.

We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.

I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.

The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.

In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.

During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.

In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.

These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.

I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.

Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.

I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.

I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.

The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes … Noble with my laptop.

Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.

The fallout was instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.

The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.

Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.

Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).

Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.

I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.

The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.

But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a column for The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.

On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.

This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.

I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.

The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.

What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.

Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.

Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.

Rep. Ilhan Omar writes to Biden in pardon effort

Minnesota Democrat writes letter to Biden on Daniel Hale’s behalf.

Star Tribune,August 26, 2021 — 5:47pm

WASHINGTON – Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar is publicly pushing President Joe Biden to pardon a former Air Force intelligence analyst after the man pleaded guilty earlier this year to leaking classified information to a journalist.

In a letter this week, Omar wrote to Biden in an effort “to strongly encourage” the Democratic president’s help in the situation facing Daniel Hale, whom Omar described as “one of the most outspoken critics of the drone program in which he had participated.”

Hale served for a time as an intelligence analyst in Afghanistan before later going to work for a defense contractor from December 2013 to August 2014, according to a statement of facts in his legal case. The indictment in Hale’s case alleged that he provided classified documents to a reporter of an unnamed online news publication after Hale obtained them during the period of time he was working for the defense contractor.

In May 2019, the U.S. Justice Department announced that Hale had been “charged with obtaining national defense information, retention and transmission of national defense information, causing the communication of national defense information, disclosure of classified communications intelligence information, and theft of government property.”

After pleading guilty in March to one count against him that involved violating the Espionage Act, Hale was sentenced last month by a judge to 45 months in prison. The other four counts against him were dismissed.

“As an analyst for the Intelligence Community, Daniel Hale knowingly took highly classified documents and disclosed them without authorization, thereby violating his solemn obligations to our country. We are firmly committed to seeking equal justice under the law and holding accountable those who betray their oath to safeguard national security information,” Raj Parekh, who serves as the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a March statement.

In her letter, Omar wrote that she takes “extremely seriously the prohibition on leaking classified information.” But she also stated that “the investigation of Mr. Hale’s leaks began under the Obama Administration,” before pointing to Hale not being indicted until former President Donald Trump was in office. Omar said she believes “that the decision to prosecute Mr. Hale was motivated, at least in part, as a threat to other would-be whistleblowers.”

She added that in Hale’s case, “the information, while politically embarrassing to some, has shone a vital light on the legal and moral problems of the drone program and informed the public debate on an issue that has for too many years remained in the shadows.” In her letter to Biden, Omar also referred to Hale’s guilty plea and his letter to a judge about the violence and impact of drone strikes, his life and decisions.

“The legal question of Mr. Hale’s guilt is settled, but the moral question remains open,” Omar wrote in the letter. “I strongly believe that a full pardon, or at least a commutation of his sentence, is warranted.”

A spokesperson for the White House referred a request for comment to the Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond Thursday.

Omar’s letter comes as Biden faces controversy and pushback for how the United States is dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after years of war.

Hunter Woodall • 612-673-4559

Twitter: @huntermw
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