AMY GOODMAN: We move now to a national issue. Alarmed by a torrent of leaks, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has endorsed legislation that for the first time explicitly would make disclosing classified information to the media a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison. Committee members, led by Chairman Richard Shelby, the senator, Republican from Alabama, says existing statutes do not cover all types of classified information and make prosecution so difficult that leaks are endangering U.S. intelligence efforts. CIA Director George Tenet, who’s complained that the executive branch “leaks like a sieve,” told Congress in July that he would love to catch a leaker because of the harm that widespread leaking does to the effort of, quote, “the men and women of our intelligence community and how it abuses the security of Americans.”

The bill, however, has generated intense opposition from First Amendment groups, a former espionage prosecutor and Attorney General Janet Reno, all of whom argue that criminal prosecutions are not necessarily the best way to stop leaks.

Well, we’ll talk to a legendary leaker. Daniel Ellsberg joins us on the phone right now. He is the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times during the Vietnam War, that many say really led to the U.S. ultimately pulling out of Vietnam.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Daniel Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Good to be here. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: You were working for the RAND Corporation at the time?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, I was a former official who had left the State Department in 1967 and gone back to the RAND Corporation, where I was still a consultant to the executive branch on national security, and particularly Vietnam. And at the time that I gave the copies and gave the Pentagon Papers, which were in my safe in RAND, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under Senator Fulbright, I was a — I was an employee of RAND and a contract employee for the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, can you give your reaction to this bill that the Intelligence Committee has put out, that would intensify the penalty, imprison people who leak information to the press?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: This effort to get what they describe as the first bill that would make disclosing classified information to the media a crime, the effort to get it, if it fails, will have proven very useful, I think, in revealing to people in the government that there is no such bill now, and never has been. They’re led to believe, as I was led to believe when I signed a lot of secrecy promises, contracts, oaths, and so forth, as they do, that there is such a bill, that you would be violating, and you’d be subjecting yourself to criminal prosecution and penalties, prison, if you gave this information to someone that your boss or the system had not authorized, whether it was the press or a congressperson, like Senator Fulbright. I later, of course, gave it to The New York Times and the Post and to 17 other newspapers, that that would be a penalty. Actually —

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, the Pentagon Papers showed that as Nixon was saying that we were deescalating in Vietnam, that they were getting more deeply involved in Vietnam.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes, the Pentagon Papers ended in 1968, before, as a history. It’s a 7,000-page top-secret history of our involvement, from ’45 to ’68. So it ended before Nixon got into office and started his policy. It showed that all previous presidents, really from Truman on, had lied to the public about what we were doing and what our aims were, what the prospects were, and what the probable costs were, at every step, that American democracy had been not just abused, but kind of aborted. There had been no real democracy here, because the Congress and the public had never been allowed to discover what we were up to in Indochina, whether it was helping the French reconquer their colony or later taking over the French effort ourselves and dominating South Vietnam.

So, when I was prosecuted, my prosecution for this leak was simply the first prosecution there ever had been. Something this story, I think, doesn’t make quite clear, that you were quoting, from The Washington Post, is that there have been exactly two prosecutions in the history of the United States for leaking to the media. And the reason — mine was the first, and there was one about 10 years later by — of a man named Samuel Loring Morison. Those are the two. And the reason there have only been two criminal prosecutions is that there is no law like the one they propose to put in. But, of course, if people don’t realize that, if they think there is such a law that they’re subject to, they act in that way, and you don’t get as much information as you need and you should about what our government is doing, because people are afraid to be sent to prison if they tell.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Daniel Ellsberg, there seem to be two especially troubling aspects to this, to me. One is the enormous amount of material that the government — that government agencies typically classify. And two is the enormous number of people within the government, including Congress and the political leaders, who engage in the leaking process, because I know that, for instance, a report that we did on the FBI files on Puerto Rico, Louis Freeh has admitted that there are 1.8 million documents, most of them classified, that he is now releasing, having to do just with the FBI’s involvement in Puerto Rico, so that the — could you comment a little bit about this abuse of this notion of classified information by the government?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, of course, if you reveal, if you’re a government official or you have a clearance and you’re looking at classified material, if you release that to someone that your boss, your organization, the president, whoever, in the executive branch doesn’t want told, doesn’t want informed, you are certainly subject to administrative penalties. You can lose your job, your clearance. Losing your clearance, you lose, essentially, your career in that line of work altogether. And these are very strong sanctions. Less than that, you can lose your access to a particular project and lose your influence, lose your chance for promotion. All of these are really very strong sanctions, and they keep most people’s mouths shut, even when they realize that this information should belong to the public, needs to be known by Congress or the public, but they aren’t going to give up their career or their jobs. And that will always be the case. You can’t stop bureaucracies, whether it’s, frankly, probably Pacifica, or PSR or whoever, NPR, from enforcing administrative penalties like that on keeping dirty laundry, keeping the bureaucratic secrets of that organization.

The question is whether you want to add to those administrative sanctions criminal sanctions for the first time. And as I say, as these legislators are admitting, there is actually no law now that forbids this. It’s not criminal. The question really is: Do you want more information going to the public that is being currently withheld, being currently, quote, “protected” or stamped classified? Or do you want less? The implication of these people is that, like all government officials, they want much less. And as you say, there is a good deal of leaking. There’s a great deal. The question is: Is there enough? Do you want more or less?

I would say that the price of the secrecy system, one of the prices we’ve had to pay for the secrecy system, as it exists, was our 30-year War in Vietnam — and I’m counting from 1945, really, when we began supporting the French, at least implicitly, ’til 1975, or the last 10 years, which cost — of that war, which cost 58,000 American lives and several million Vietnamese. That was a very considerable price.

And that’s not by any means the only price. Ongoing interventions of all kinds have involved deception, and protected — that deception is protected by secrecy, and secrecy is protected by these fear administrative penalties, the threat of firing, loss of access, loss of job, loss of career and so forth. To add to that the real prospect of actual prosecutions, not just two, but 10, 100, 1,000, whatever they want, to intimidate people even further into keeping these secrets and reducing the number of leaks, I think, would be to give up the prospect of democracy in foreign policy. And the price of that would be great. It wouldn’t just — I don’t think of that democracy as a luxury. As I say, I think our democracy enabled us finally to end the Vietnam War, that our executive branch would have kept going indefinitely.

AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post quotes John Martin, who is — supervised the prosecutions of 76 accused spies and won convictions in all but one of those cases, is saying that the bill is vague and probably unconstitutional. He said the biggest leakers are White House aides, cabinet secretaries, generals and admirals and members of Congress. He said, “If this were enacted, enforced and upheld by the courts, you would relocate you could relocate the capital from Washington to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania,” the site of a federal penitentiary.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: That might be good in some respects, if we could — oh, I don’t know. I’m just thinking of the quality of leadership we’ve had for a while. But let me take that back. By the way, the people he prosecuted were spies. We do have laws against espionage. Their prosecutions are held all the time. People go to prison all the time for that, and our laws are very adequate.

The experiment in my case, back in 1971, was to use espionage laws, without charging me with espionage, by the way, but to use those laws as the basis for a prosecution of a leaker to the media, to the public. This was the first time —

AMY GOODMAN: And under this bill, it would be — and so, under this bill, though, it would be much easier, and you wouldn’t have to be charged with espionage to be prosecuted.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: This bill could almost be called the the Ellsberg Act or the We’ll Get Ellsberg Next Time Act.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think its chances are of passing?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well —

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think it’s going to have a chilling effect even just being considered?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: As I say, if the discussion of it and, like, articles like this reveal to
officials who are now in the government that they are not facing a law now, that this law is yet to be passed, that could have a very good effect. People could say, “Oh.” At least some people, who would not be willing to go to prison, but would be perhaps willing to risk their jobs, might be induced to tell us information that they ought to. But that’d be good. If the law were passed, of course, you would then at last have this Official Secrets Act of the kind they have in most countries in the world who don’t have a First Amendment to the Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Daniel Ellsberg, I want to thank you very much for being with us. The legendary leaker made the Pentagon Papers available to everyone in this country and around the world. Thank you for joining us.

You’re listening to Pacific Radio’s Democracy Now! When we come back, a quick conversation about what happened in New York this weekend with, it looks like now, more than 44 women sexually attacked as they came out of a big celebration of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Then we’re going to go to a debate on a terrorism commission series of recommendations, particularly around the monitoring of foreign students. Stay with us.