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If I remember correctly, Nixon did consider trying to lay charges against The New York Times and The Washington Post for printing the Pentagon Papers and certainly Trump in this crazy, maniacal state, you know, talking about recognizing, not recognizing the mail-in ballots and calling on his gangs to stand by and so on. What makes them think they wouldn't charge the New York Times?
Daniel EllsbergCan't really explain. You know, the first column describing Julian in The New York Times, which, of course, he'd collaborated with, and putting out this information fairly closely. And I think he thought of himself as being on a team with The New York Times, which I thought of it at the beginning when I gave information to Neil Sheehan, but that I quickly learned I was not on the team, no consultation, whatever. They didn't work with me. The way actually they did work with Julian Assange, as the other papers did, in deciding how to interpret this stuff and what to put in, what not to put in quite a lot of working arrangement, which I didn't have.
They wrote an article about Julian and they described him as scruffy, ill-clad, arrogant, and didn't like to deal with it. Made a big point that he smelled bad, that he was the reason he didn't brave enough, and so forth. It was a real smear, actually, altogether. They did much the same with Chelsea Manning, actually. And I know that at that time I was in communication with him and I saw him in London after that, putting out the direct cables. And I know that he was quite put up by this. He said, what? Why? I said, Julian, I could have warned you that this is the way he would be treated. Its the way I was treated, actually, by The New York Times. They don't think of a source or even in his case, Chelsea was a source, but he was a junior publisher. But, you know, they thought of him as a source.
I think they think of sources as the way police think of their snitches, their informants. Each one each policeman has his own informants, but he thinks of them as criminals, bad guys who, you know, maybe protecting to some extent for his source of information. But he has no respect for what they tell him. Here are people who some of them are telling stuff, officials all the time for their own benefit. They're not going to get they're not under the risk of prosecution.
But whistleblowers who are doing this for the good of the country at their own risk, I don't think newsmen, personnel, women see them much differently. They try to protect who they are for various reasons so they can get more information. But beyond that, it's not a matter of real respect. They don't see it as part of the process part of the team. I think that really ought to change. I would like to see a Pulitzer Prize for sources as well as journalists.
I wouldn't be named. No doubt it would be anonymous if you could you could find out who they were. I'm not asking for it to be retroactive exactly, but at all. But I think that would be to show that this is a legitimate, important part of a democracy and have a republic and that these unauthorized disclosure show, in the case of the whistleblowers, a very high form of patriotism. People say the highest part, I'm not going to compare, but I'm going to say it's a high form of patriotism and we need it and we need a lot more of it than we've had so far.
In the whole process here I think the journalists need to re-examine their relationship to the secrecy system. Oh, certainly one less thing to see here. I think they like the secrecy system as it is journalists because it gives them scoops when somebody an official gives them classified information as a leak, not making it available and not declassifying it, not making it available to journalists at large because classified documents are here, you know, don't tell don't associate my name with it and so forth. The journalist gets exclusive. Other journalists don't get it. Now, next week, somebody else gets it. He doesn't get it or she doesn't get it. But then again, if he's a good boy or girl, you'll get it again. You know, if it doesn't criticize you, doesn't complain about the fact that what they were given was false, you a classified lie or misleading, as long as they don't mention that, they'll get more of them. And I don't think they realize that they are not remotely getting the amount of information the public needs and they should be giving it to them. They don't they are not aware how much-classified information should be available to the public.
Paul JayWhat's really going on here, I think, is that Julian Assange poked his nose, his hands with Manning right into the state, right into the heart of the darkest part of the U.S. state.
They exposed war crimes, the murder of innocent civilians. If they can go after Julian, why can't they charge every journalist in the world that writes an investigative piece the American government doesn't like?
The whole thing is nuts. What they're really saying is you can't mess with the American state. You don't dare work with a whistleblower so close to real secrets.
Daniel Ellsberg What's called the Espionage Act, they're charging it is so-called because up until my case, it was used only against spies for espionage. Actually, my case was a non-espionage case. I was not only not charged with espionage and Julian is not charged with espionage and is not being tried under the paragraphs of the law that apply specifically to spies. He's applied to would apply to journalists and to officials who put out information like me and the letter.
Now, the so-called Espionage Act, as I say, is actually 18 USC 793 paragraphs DNE that are mainly used here actually used a paragraph PB against Julian as well, wasn't against me. But I can run that off not being a lawyer because I was the first person charged under that. That's the only law that I can identify that well. The word espionage was banned by all emotion from my prosecutor from the courtroom because he didn't want the jury to hear that I was being charged with espionage, which I wasn't because that would appear so absurd, the same. So they said the word espionage shall not be used in this courtroom, even though it's generally known as the Espionage Act.
Second, Jullian is as I see is not charged with espionage, despite the allegation of Pompeo that I'll come to in a moment. But he's being charged with violations of 793 paragraphs DNE and some other paragraph. OK, it's a non-espionage charge which are trying to use the Espionage Act or the 793 as if it were either. It's actually as if it were a British UK Official Secrets Act, which we don't have because Congress has always decided that that would clearly violate the First Amendment, which says, you know, freedom, which protects freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
So Congress has always said we don't want an official secrets act, except which criminalizes all revelation of classified information without correction as to whether intent or whatnot. But it criminalizes it all. We don't want that. In fact, almost nobody notices, but I follow this pretty closely. Congress didn't have such an act by voice vote in the year 2000 in the last months of Clinton's administration. And Clinton, after considering heavily for over two, vetoed it and said it violated the First Amendment almost. None of it nobody knows is exactly that did happen unconstitutional and I couldn't do it, and because the main pusher of that act, I believe, was Senator Shelby, and since it was later, a year or two later came out that Shelby was the source of a major serious leak, actually, of the fact that we had a double agent in Osama Bin Laden's camp, and he put that out to show how much he was in the know. He kind of was put out of action as a pusher, as a leader of criminalization of what he had just done.
Interesting point. There is there was an example of a secret that really shouldn't have been put out. I wouldn't have put it out. I don't know of any colleague of mine who would ever imagine putting out a piece of information like that. But because it served his political interests, he did. And of course, he didn't get prosecuted, but he did lay back from pushing his Official Secrets Act at that point. There have been other cases like that of putting out information that really shouldn't be out.
Are there secrets that should be held to be secret? Yes, of course. Are there leaks that shouldn't happen? Yes.
When Scooter Libby and others also put out the names of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent for which Libby was convicted and then given clemency by George W. Bush, that shouldn't have been out, actually proving that there was a case, by the way, of Valerie Plame was doing good work against proliferation and nuclear proliferation. To do that, she had to run networks of agents and she had to be undercover. They didn't want her name. She, you know, find us. There was a secret that should have been kept, but it served the interests of Cheney to punish her husband for leaking information about Cheney's lie and embarrassing to the vice president. And so to punish him, they ended his wife's career as a clandestine agent and endangered all of her agents, her network of agents elsewhere.
Paul Jay That was Ambassador Joe Wilson. I did the last interview with Wilson before he passed away. And that series is up on theAnalysis.neNws website.
Daniel EllsbergYeah, interestingly, I got to know, Joe, we liked each other very much and I admired him for what he'd put out and what he'd done. He never wanted to be called a whistleblower. And he told me because it still had that connotation, freedom of speech of informer and he didn't want it, for anybody. He said, no, I'm not like you. I'm not a whistleblower. I actually pretty much a liar. But no, he didn't like the work.
It's only become an acceptable word in recent years. Actually, I think the change was when Coleen Rowley and two other women were on the cover of Time as Whistleblowers of the Year Action Against Whistleblowers, Persons of the Year whistleblowers. I saw a change in public acceptance of that. And that was because they'd all put out information in her case on the FBI, on others, Enron and others, you know, deserved to be a better word now. But it should be there should be a lot more of it. And if Trump's efforts against the journalists, I suspect that the Espionage Act permits prosecution of events succeeds, there will be many fewer whistleblowers, not zero, because there are people like Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden who will say and Snowden put it. Some things are worth dying for. Chelsea said, I'm prepared to go to prison for life or even face capital punishment, as she did, by the way, you know, charges, I saw that and I said, gee, I haven't heard anybody say that. For thirty-nine years, that's the way I felt, so I felt an identification with them. Those two people that I don't have more than anybody else on Earth, as a matter of fact, I hardly know Chelsea, EEd a friend of mine now, we're both on the Freedom of the Press Foundation. But even without knowing her, I feel a great identification with her. It's not you can't point to too many people who, unfortunately, I wouldn't do that, even though the stakes are enormously high, worth it. What's more important is you don't find people who are willing to risk their careers, their clearances, their access, and seriously their marriages, their children's education, whatever. And some they won't risk at any risk to their job. I would say to put out information that might save an untold number of lives or save the Constitution, as in Snowden's case.
So coming right back to this case, the First Amendment is directly attacked in this case in a new way, it was attacked, in my case to and the others. The constitutionality of using the espionage act piece was regarded as wrong, as false, the invalid as early as mine by legal scholars. And that's been true for all of the previous successive uses against officials who put out information. It was always regarded as blatantly unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment against journalists or publishers like Julian. And it is.
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