Dan Ellsberg on Past, Present, Future

[struggle4progress]

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon Radio
August 1, 2008

... ELLSBERG ... I had full access to the Pentagon Papers as a researcher who was working for the Pentagon on learning “Lessons from Failure in Vietnam.” I was studying those at the RAND Corporation and read them as a record of four presidents’ lies, crimes, breaking treaties, deceiving Congress and the public into war in much the same way as we were deceived into the Iraq War. There’s a very close parallel there.

And I hoped when I learned that Nixon was going to continue the war and even expand it and was making secret threats, including nuclear threats, at that time, that Congress might better resist that or be skeptical of it if they understood the background. So I copied and gave the Senate <Foreign Relations Committee> the 7,000 top-secret pages of the study ...

I had a wrong understanding of the law, which was shared by nearly everybody. We don’t actually have an Official Secrets Act—yet, although I think that might well lie in our future--which criminalizes any unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Almost nobody knows that we don’t have such a law, so when they pass it I’m not sure they will notice. But in fact I was the first person to ever be prosecuted for leaking unauthorized documents ...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/073108c.html