AMY GOODMAN: He was a U.S. Marine company commander, a Pentagon official, an analyst at the RAND Corporation and a staunch supporter of America’s battle against communist expansion. None of this hinted at the role he would play in ending the War in Vietnam. In October of 1969, Daniel Ellsberg began smuggling out of his office and xeroxing the 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. He did so with the intent of revealing these secrets to Congress and the American public, and, in so doing, set in motion actions that would eventually topple the Nixon presidency and end the Vietnam War.

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is Dan Ellsberg’s first account of why and how he revealed these papers, and how his actions helped alter the course of U.S. history. Today, we welcome to our studio the man described by Henry Kissinger as “the world’s most dangerous man.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dan Ellsberg.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Welcome. I’m honored to be here with Amy Goodman, I think the boldest, courageous and just most reputable journalist I know of in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, thanks very much. We’re going to talk about you for this hour. And I’m sorry you have laryngitis, but I think it’s worth the strain, for people around the country, especially young people, for whom 30 years — well, they weren’t born 30 years ago. And it was more than 30 years ago, when, on October 1st, 1969, you started your mission. Maybe it began before that, but why don’t you talk about what you did on that day?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I went out past the guards desk at night in the RAND Corporation with a suitcase — not a — rather, a briefcase.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the RAND Corporation.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The RAND Corporation is a not-for-profit research corporation, one of the first to be called a “think tank,” that did research for the U.S. Air Force, to begin with, and then came to do research directly for the secretary of defense. And ultimately, in fact, I may have been the first person there, that I know of, to do research directly or consulting directly with the White House, under Henry Kissinger, at the end of 1968 for the president-elect, President Nixon, and then, in early '69, that very year. So, I'd been writing memos for the president early in ’69. It was the height of a consulting career, in effect, for me, and even for the RAND Corporation.

By the end of that year, October, I was doing something that I expected would put me in prison for life. And as a matter of fact, Nixon did indict me for a possible 115-year sentence, so if I had served all of that, I’d be getting out in 2008 with good behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you served all that, you’d be very lucky man, 115 years.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, it’s 35 years with good behavior, though, as somebody pointed out to me later, “No, you wouldn’t be, in 2008.” I took that as a compliment. I don’t know how good my behavior would be in prison.

AMY GOODMAN: So, first of all, how did you get — how did you get your hands on the papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: The study was done on the orders of president — of Secretary of Defense McNamara in — studying in about June of 1967, just as I was coming back from two years in Vietnam, with the State Department. I had volunteered to go there in ’65, when I was in the Defense Department working as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense. So I was there in ’64, ’65, for a year, during the whole buildup on the war, the steps leading toward the escalation of the war, and then, ultimately, the open-ended escalation of the war in July of ’65. At that point, we were in war, and I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I switched to the State Department.

And in Vietnam, I used my Marine background. I had been in the Marines from ’54 to ’57 and had been, as a first lieutenant, a rifle company commander, something I was and I am very proud of, actually. It was an unusual post, and it was a very satisfying time for me, that time. And I was able to use that training to go into the field with Vietnamese troops and with American troops and observe combat operations and, actually, in effect, take part as an observer, although I was a civilian. So I saw the war up close.

I had — you know, your introduction, which the audience will have heard, that earlier it was that you were getting the bad news, you were getting; there wasn’t much peace news. It was all war news.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the guy, I think, who said, “Peace be unto you,” is —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Fired.

AMY GOODMAN: — being removed, right?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: From Guantánamo Bay.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I hope he doesn’t regret what he said, because sometimes you have to say the right thing, even if it costs you your career. And he won’t regret, I think, that action, looking back at his life, as much as Senator Byrd just told us, 38 years later, how much he was ashamed and regretted his role in saying yes to the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution back in 1964. He said he wished he had been the third, along with Senators Morse and Gruening, to vote against that delegation of power, war power, which, of course, has just been reproduced. And he was acting very correctly and courageously in leading a fight against that resolution this time. He was one of just 26 senators who voted against it this time. But that time, there were only two. So that’s something from it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to go back to your decision to xerox the thousands of pages and then what happened after that. But you brought up the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and I would like you to explain just what that is, because for a lot of people, they hear Gulf of Tonkin, and at this point, it has no meaning.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No. The nature of the resolution, there had been several like it before, in the Middle East and elsewhere, but none that led actually to being — it’s a blank check, it’s been called. None had been cashed. None had led directly to war. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was intended by the president and used as a functional declaration of war, and he intended to go to war, during a campaign when he was implying to the public or saying to the public, giving them the impression that they were voting against war, when they voted for him in landslide numbers. So he was directly deceiving them. And I knew that, as a relatively insignificant figure in the Defense Department at that time. I was high paid, but I was kind of a high-paid clerk. And I had a very good window on what was happening in the process, although essentially no influence on it. But even I knew more about what we were really planning and what would lay ahead for the United States than any of the senators. So, in that sense, Senator Byrd needn’t have felt quite as ashamed as he did 38 years later, and as Edward Kennedy does today still, the other senator who was there at that time and who voted for it, because they really were lied to by the president, had no clear idea that we were going to war. But what they were voting for was, indeed, as Morse called it, an undated declaration of war.

And it’s unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn’t provide for a delegation of open-ended, indefinite powers to the president to decide on war and peace. The Constitution is very explicitly and clearly intended to give the power of going to war entirely, exclusively to the Congress, not that they should be consulted, not that they should share it with the president, but that they alone, it says, should declare war, not the president. And by declaring war, they meant going to war in any circumstances other than an immediate attack on our forces, which it was always clear the president had the right to respond to quickly, until Congress acted, or nowadays you could say 'til the U.N. came in on it. The U.N. also allows that immediate self-defense. In the eyes of the U.N. today, since ’45, the U.N. Charter, again, self-defense, meaning direct attack on our forces, or the very, within hours, imminence of it, authorizes a country to defend itself, until the U.N. Security Council can act. But under — and we don't, of course, have that now. But under any other circumstances, it’s ruled out, unless it is authorized by the U.N. It’s the counterpart to the provision in Congress in the Constitution. So, if neither — so, if what he’s proposing to do with unilateral action, in the absence of U.N. action, if they don’t give him the authorization he wants, is pure, clear-cut aggression, a criminal violation of the — under the Criminal Court, and that exists, certainly illegal violation of U.N. Charter, which is the highest law of our land, having been ratified and signed by the U.S. country, would be a violation of his oath of office, among other things. That’s what he’s proposing to do.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break. And when we come back, I want to ask you what turned you around, what led you from your path of being just a top security clearance Pentagon official, RAND Corporation employee, just having come back from Vietnam, originally going gung-ho for war in Vietnam, what turned you around to being one of the leading peace activists, and what role did the people who were protesting outside play in your transformation, when you were inside looking at them from the Pentagon. We’re talking to Dan Ellsberg. He has just written his life story in his memoir, called Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Stevie Wonder, “Skeletons,” here on Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Dan Ellsberg. He’s written his life story in quite a tome, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam. Again, this is a man who served in the military, went to Vietnam, came back as a top security clearance Pentagon official and RAND Corporation employee, was working at the RAND Corporation when, in 1969, he started to spirit out thousands of pages of top-secret ] Pentagon documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. So, each night, you went out. As you passed the guard, if they found what was in your briefcase, what could they have done to you?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: We don’t have an Official Secrets Act, actually, though Donald Rumsfeld talks as though we do all the time. It makes a clear-cut case for prosecution. Nevertheless, that’s because of our First Amendment in our Constitution. It’s always been held to preclude the kind of Official Secrets Act that even Britain does, which I would clearly have violated in this case. Congress had never passed such an act since a few years ago, the last days of Clinton, and Clinton vetoed it, so we don’t have it. Of course, this president would not veto it, certainly, if and when it comes up again. But I did believe at that time, having been told so, falsely, by my superiors many times, that there was what amounted to an Official Secrets Act, that I was violating and that I would go to prison for the rest of my life.

The reason, a factor that got me into that readiness to do that in 1969, even though I had known this war was a loser as early as 1961, when I first visited, and certainly from '66 on, in Vietnam, in my field experience there, I thought we should get out of it, that it was imprudent. We were killing people and dying for no reason. I thought it was illegitimate. And that was very important to me, as a member of the armed — I was then a civilian, as an official, and earlier as a Marine. You mentioned that I was a Cold Warrior, which I certainly was. I also was a just warrior. And I went in the Marines, in part, rather than the Air Force, because I didn't want to be involved in bombing civilians, as we had done during the Second World War and in Korea, and I felt that Marines, man to man in the islands in the Pacific, they fought against military targets. Of course, that changed somewhat in Vietnam. I was very sorry to see that. But I believed in the absolute prescription against killing civilians, against torture, violating any of the crimes of war, and, above all, against fighting against aggression. I grew up, from 10 to 14 during the Second World War, believing that we were on the right cause, above all, because we were fighting aggression. I entered the Marines during the Korean emergency, because I felt that was against aggression. I was glad when I was in the Marines that our president, that I hadn’t voted for, Eisenhower, moved against the British and French in their invasion of Suez and their colonial reconquest, in effect, calling it aggression. I thought, “My country is against aggression, even when it’s done by our closest allies.”

Right now, of course, I’m in the horrifying position of seeing our president proposing, quite openly, that we commit aggression. And even Richard Armey, a House majority leader that I don’t remember ever agreeing with on any point before, found himself saying this would be aggression, and he opposed it, until he raised his hand as a Republican in support of that resolution, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which does give the president an unlimited line of credit — in fact, it’s not just a check — something he can go back to indefinitely, for him to decide when we go to war. A majority of the House Democrats — rather, the Senate Democrats in the Senate covered themselves with shame by going along with that, in the spirit of a Soviet legislature or maybe Saddam Hussein’s legislature, just a rubber stamp. It is to the credit of Senator Byrd and the 20-odd other senators who did oppose that, but it’s very hard in this democracy — and this shows the limits of our democracy — to stop a president who’s on a reckless, aggressive course, stop him.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, you made a decision in 1969 to change your life, to change the course of history in this country. When you look at the press today, leading newspapers, like The Washington Post and The New York Times, and you look at their coverage of protests, it won’t take you very long to read the articles, because they hardly appear. When close to 400,000 people, between 200,000 and 400,000 people, protested in Britain, The New York Times did not have an article. The Washington Post didn’t mention it at the time that had happened. When there are tens of thousands of people marching in the streets, almost no coverage. What role did those protests in the streets back in the Vietnam War play in your life, when you walked past them, when you looked out the window? How secluded were you from them? What did you think of those people screaming in the streets?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, I wasn’t entirely secluded, because, after all, like many people in the government, I actually agreed with their aims at that point. In 1967, when I was writing, working on the Pentagon Papers in the Pentagon, I marched on a Saturday morning from the Washington Monument over to the Pentagon with 25,000 people who were protesting that war, and I thoroughly agreed with them. I then went in the Pentagon, and I went to the office, when we were writing the papers, which happened to be right next to Secretary McNamara’s office. I walked into McNamara’s office. I didn’t think he’d be there on a Saturday. And he was out there. He was there. But I knew him. I’d written speeches for him. We didn’t say anything. I sat in — I stood in an adjacent window and watched those protesters. I think he — in fact, he says he did — he agreed with the protesters at that point. I have to say that although demonstrations were important, they were particularly important in 1969. They were crucial in stopping President Nixon possibly from using nuclear weapons, and certainly from escalating in Vietnam.

But what really got through to me was not demonstrators in ’67. It was people who were going beyond that, not into violence, because there were such people, a few of them, who played directly into the hands of people who wanted to justify repression in this country and a police state — and I think that would be true today. The people who got through to me and made a difference in my life were people who nonviolently and truthfully were giving everything they had, doing everything they could, and that involved, for some of them, the males, going to jail, going to prison, simply for not cooperating with the draft, to send the strongest message they could that this war was wrong and that one should do everything you could to resist it, even at the cost of your career or going to prison. I heard that. And I asked myself then what I could do. And putting out these 7,000 pages were among those things.

I’m very happy to say that there are people right now I see who are doing what they can. We’re seeing more unauthorized disclosures, more leaks from the Pentagon than were ever true in the Vietnam War. We’re seeing people like Scott Ritter and, in Congress, like Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich and Senator Byrd, who are speaking out. Byrd wanted to filibuster, which was going further than he could. I’m sure we will be seeing civil disobedience.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about yourself as a target of the president, once you started to speak out, once you got the papers in your possession? I wanted to talk about Nixon having the break-in, the Nixon administration, the break-in of your psychiatrists office, what this meant to you, and also what it was like to approach The New York Times and The Washington Post with the papers that you had. Tell it in chronological order.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I first approached the — well, I’m sorry, but how much time do we have here?

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, we have a half an hour.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh boy. I first approached the Pentagon Papers with my first unauthorized disclosure, or leak, as my wife hates the word “leak” — she doesn’t like me to be called a “leaker.” She thinks it sounds incontinent. It’s a pejorative term. But the leak was actually in '68, as I tell in the book for the first time, actually, hadn't revealed this before particularly, but in the prospect of major escalation coming just after the Tet Offensive. When I saw someone else’s leak of 206,000 men being requested by Westmoreland, I realized that leaking could be a patriotic act and a conscientious act, which I really hadn’t realized before, and an effective act. So I began a leak-a-day program to convince President Johnson that his administration was now a goldfish bowl and that he couldn’t count on keeping secret his plans for escalation until they were a fait accompli. I did that through Neil Sheehan. So, when the time came in ’69 to put out this history —

AMY GOODMAN: Neil Sheehan being?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Neil Sheehan of The New York Times.

AMY GOODMAN: The reporter.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: So, I went — I hadn’t seen him, particularly, in the meantime, in the next year and a half. But I went back to him — actually, not in ’69, but I first gave the papers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They did nothing. They were afraid of the political consequences for the committee if they put them out, Senator Fulbright. And after two more invasions, in ’70 and ’71, in Laos and Cambodia, I decided to go to the newspapers, which I should have done in the beginning. If I were to do something different now, I would have gone to them in the beginning.

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning years before.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, years, in '69. Instead of the Senate only, I would have given it to the Senate and The New York Times. That was a mistake. As Coleen Rowley of the FBI, she sent her memo to her boss in the FBI about his deceptions, she also sent it to the Congress, and it also found its way into the press, whether by her or somebody else. That was the right way to do it, because Congress won't move unless the public presses them to do it, and the public has to hear about it. So, that did make a difference. But even that, of course, didn’t stop the war. After the Pentagon Papers came out in ’71, the war had four years to go and two more years of heavy U.S. bombing.

What did turn out, in the end — it looked as though nothing had happened. So, part of the message of this book is a success story, following a lot more failure. The message is, in a way, you really can’t tell what the ripples will be from an act of truth telling, and it may look as though it’s had no effect except to hurt your career, which it probably will, for quite some time. But in this case, it turns out, Nixon was afraid, with good reason, that I had more documents on his own administration. I had, after all, worked for Henry Kissinger in the thing. I did, in fact, have some documents, but not as much as he feared. People hadn’t given them to me, or I would have put them out instead of the Pentagon Papers. So, he was afraid I would put out documents, current documents, as is happening now, and I hope will happen very much in the weeks to come, current documents on current illegalities, current lies by the president, deceptions and so forth. And he felt he had to stop me from that. He took criminal measures to do so. He sent burglars into my former psychoanalyst’s office looking for material with which to blackmail me, blackmail me into silence. And when he didn’t find that, and he couldn’t have done it anyway —

AMY GOODMAN: How did that affect you?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I didn’t know it at the time. And I had decided already that I was ready to go to prison. I was ready to have my reputation ruined. So nothing really would have blackmailed me.

Then he sent people up to beat me up, to shut me silently, on May 3rd, 1972. And when those people were found in the Watergate — same people — he, by mistake, used the same people for this whole series of crimes. So, when they were caught, they had earlier crimes of the White House to reveal, and they had to be kept quiet about those, so he had to pay them off, pay off Howard Hunt, pay off others, to keep them quiet, make them lie in front of the grand jury about other crimes. These were new crimes of obstruction of justice. And when this web of crime, of lies, began to fall apart, with John Dean revealing it to the prosecutors, it ended my trial with governmental misconduct, but, much more importantly, it brought Nixon eventually into impeachment proceedings, which caused him to resign —

AMY GOODMAN: Publication.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: — and which the — I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: The publication of the Pentagon Papers first went to the Supreme Court.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oh, well, that, yes. But I’m saying that the publication itself was only history, and putting out history — this is something I’ve learned — presidents do live with pretty well. They say, “That’s all changed now. That was the previous administration.” It did affect public opinion very much. It got a lot of publicity. But it did not affect his administration of the war. He kept right on. Public opinion is against the president right now. As you notice, it isn’t slowing him down. I don’t think it’s expected to. But information that he is distinctly at this moment misleading the public, as I’m sure he is lying to them, being prepared to violate his oath of office in various ways, that would worry him a lot more. I’m glad to say that’s happening.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back in time into the Supreme Court to the actual recordings of the defense of The New York Times, when the president tried to have the Times stopped from publishing the Pentagon Papers. We get this from a project that — where a professor went into — a professor went into the Supreme Court, found the tape recordings of the Supreme Court arguments. And this is a part of that project.

NARRATOR: William Glendon argued for The Washington Post. Chief Justice Burger asked about the immediate harm standard.

CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN BURGER: Mr. Glendon, how does a government meet the burden of proof in the sense that Judge Gesell laid it down? That doesn’t bring any battleships to the outer limits of New York Harbor or set off any — any missiles. But would you say that it’s not a very grave matter?

WILLIAM GLENDON: Well, I think if we are to place possibilities or conjecture against suspension or abridgment of the First Amendment, the answer is obvious: The fact, the possibility, the conjecture or the hypothesis that diplomatic negotiations would be made more difficult or embarrassed does not justify — and this is what we have in this case, I think — it’s all we have — does not justify suspending the First Amendment.

CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN BURGER: You’re now in the possession — in the position of making demands on the First Amendment.

WILLIAM GLENDON: That’s right.

CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN BURGER: And you say the newspaper has a right to protect its sources.

WILLIAM GLENDON: I see —

CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN BURGER: But the government does not.

WILLIAM GLENDON: I see no conflict, Your Honor. I see no conflict at all. We’re in the position of asking that there not be a prior restraint in violation of the Constitution imposed on us and that equity should not do that. We are also in a position of saying that under the First Amendment, we are entitled to protect our sources. And I find — frankly, I just don’t find any conflict there, Your Honor.

NARRATOR: Glendon reminded the court of the stakes in the case.

WILLIAM GLENDON: It isn’t just that the United States has been injured. Judge Gesell made a point, which I think is a very good one, that — and I think, perhaps, the government may forget — that the interests of the United States are the people’s interest. And you’re weighing here — and this is why I suppose we’re here, but you’re weighing here an abridgment of the First Amendment, the people’s right to know. And that may be an abstraction, but it’s one that’s kept this country and made it great for some 200 years. And you’re being asked to approve something that the government has never done before. We were told by the attorney general to stop publishing this news. We didn’t obey that order, and we were brought into court. And we ended up being enjoined.

NARRATOR: Solicitor General Griswold spoke in rebuttal. Justices Thurgood Marshall and Hugo Black had questions.

ERWIN GRISWOLD: I think that if properly classified materials are improperly acquired, and that it can be shown that they do have an immediate or current impact on the security of the United States, that there ought to be a temp — there ought to be an injunction. Now, I think it is relevant at this point —

JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL: But wouldn’t we then be, the federal courts be the censorship board as to whether this does —

ERWIN GRISWOLD: That’s a pejorative way to put it, Mr. Justice. I don’t know what the alternative is.

JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL: That’s what I [inaudible] —

ERWIN GRISWOLD: The —

JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL: — First Amendment might be.

ERWIN GRISWOLD: Then — yes, Mr. Justice. And we are, of course, fully supporting the First Amendment. We do not claim or suggest any exception to the First Amendment. And we do not agree with Mr. Glendon when he says that we set aside the First Amendment, or that Judge Gesell or the two courts of appeals in this case have set aside the First Amendment by issuing the injunction, which they have. The problem in this case is the construction of the First Amendment. Now, Mr. Justice Black, your construction of that is well known, and I certainly respect it. You say that no law means no law, and that should be obvious. And I can only say, Mr. Justice, that, to me, it is equally obvious that no law does not mean no law, and I would seek to persuade the court that that is true.

NARRATOR: On June 30th, 1971, only four days after this argument, the Supreme Court decided the Pentagon Papers case. In a three-paragraph opinion, six justices agreed that the government had not met the First Amendment’s heavy presumption against prior restraints on the press. This short opinion was all the majority agreed on. Reflecting the nation’s division over the Vietnam War, each of the nine justices wrote a separate opinion. Justice Hugo Black blasted the government for what he called a “flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment.”

AMY GOODMAN: And that was an excerpt of May It Please the Court, a fascinating look at what was going on inside the Supreme Court. Few Americans know that every case argued before the Supreme Court since 1955 has been recorded, tapes that have lingered in a tiny room in the basement of the National Archive, until only recently. And these tapes were edited by Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton. Professor Peter Irons teaches political science and is director of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project at the University of California. And you are listening to Democracy Now! As you listen to this, Dan Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers not being your case — this was The Washington Post, The New York Times against the government. Nixon tried to prevent the papers from publishing those thousands of pages that you had spirited out of the basement, top-secret documents about the war. What was going on behind the scenes at the paper? Did they immediately want to publish?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, first, I know nothing of what was happening in the paper. I was underground while all this was happening, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as it so happens, though the —

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “underground”?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, meaning that I was in the homes of people whose names I didn’t know, but friends of friends, and who were asked, “We’re doing something,” they would say, “that might help end the war. It might be very dangerous for you. Can you help?” Everyone said yes. They didn’t ask any questions. They got out of their apartments. They let them be used. That was a time when all you had to do, to do that, was ask a question like that.

AMY GOODMAN: You were fleeing the police.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: So, I was putting the papers out. And to do that, I couldn’t be on observation by the police. So, while they were arguing these cases for the Post and the others, I was, through these other people — I couldn’t, of course, have done any of it by myself — was having the editors phoned, papers were being gotten to 17 other newspapers, all of whom were defying statements by the president and the attorney general that their publication would be direct violation of the national security and would subject them to prosecution.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was going on?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: They were committing civil disobedience.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was going on inside the papers?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, inside the papers, initially, from the Post and the Times, they both faced great opposition from their legal departments. In fact, the Washington — The New York Times lost its traditional law firm — I think it was Day & Lord — who would not be party to what they saw as treason, as going against the wishes of the president to keep this information secret. The _Post_’s attitude — and the Times got a new law firm and went ahead, to their great credit. Washington Post faced the same thing. Katharine Graham was under great pressure from her lawyers that a stock offering they had just put out would be endangered if they were indicted, and they could lose their television franchises, very, very major financial loss, just by being indicted. And she went ahead, very, very credibly and courageously, faced in part with an almost revolt, a readiness to revolt by her news staff, like Don Oberdorfer and Ben Bagdikian, if she had not gone ahead. That was the — and Ben Bradlee. They might have all resigned.

I have a feeling, by the way, that there’s that kind of revolt going on in the government right now. How did George Tenet come to do an astounding thing as head of the CIA — I’m not a fan of George Tenet — but writing a letter, unclassified, to the Intelligence Committee informing them that what the president had said two days earlier was false or was not at all supported by intelligence information.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that. George Tenet has just said that what George Bush said —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, the director of the — what he had said was, in effect — well, it was directly — was that, to the best of their knowledge, they had not found any direct link at all between al-Qaeda, which is a real danger to this country, and Saddam, and, in effect, that Saddam was not an immediate threat to this country in any real sense, that if he got nuclear weapons, in their judgment, he would be very unlikely to use them, unless he were attacked, which we’re about to do. And if he were attacked, it was their judgment, he would then be almost sure to use what he had in the way of chemical and biological weapons. That could not — how could George Tenet have, I’m sure, done that unauthorized, defied the White House to that extent? I have a personal suspicion, from my time in the government, he was faced with the possibility of near revolt in his own staff if they continued to be silent in the face of presidential lies.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, we have to break for stations to identify themselves, and we’re going to be back with the man who released the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages he, night by night, xeroxed in the basement of the RAND Corporation, and then gave them to the major newspapers of the day, which eventually published them. Dan Ellsberg faced life in prison. He went underground. He did it all anyway. And we’re talking about his transformation. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, Resistance Radio. Dan Ellsberg is our guest. He’s not only the man who changed history, whose release of the Pentagon Papers led to the beginning of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, that led to his resignation, it led to the end of the Vietnam War, but he’s also a leading anti-nuclear activist today and is speaking around the country about what is happening today. You talk about perhaps a revolt within the George Bush the second administration, perhaps that people inside the Central Intelligence Agency and others are saying that the information that Bush is putting out are actually lies, they’re not based on intelligence reports, George Tenet giving a report to the Intelligence Committee that said Saddam Hussein is not ready to release biological or nuclear weapons, unless provoked. We began with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. What about now?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, right now — pardon me — if Saddam has weapons ready to go on missiles, or if he is about to have them ready to go on missiles, then, if and when we attack, which could be very soon, I happen to think that it’s quite likely the bombing, not the troops, which would cause casualties on our side, but the bombing, is quite likely to happen before the election. That’s a minority view, but that’s my reading of what’s likely to happen. When Saddam is faced with invasion, I believe, as Tenet says, the CIA, he will use what he has. And what will that lead to? It may fizzle. It may not cause many casualties. I wouldn’t want to be there on the ground with my chemical warfare suit testing how well it works against nerve gas. But if it causes significant casualties, both Israel and the U.S. have, more or less explicitly, promised a response with nuclear weapons. We could be within weeks, or a few months, of a first use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and/or Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: What is Bush doing? Why is he doing this? What’s your estimation of this?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: You know, I don’t know. It’s perplexing. I’ve been asking people that. And the best answer that hangs together to me is that his — or, I don’t know what his views are exactly, but Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, the people who seem to have the upper hand over Powell in this administration, that their view stretches far beyond Iraq. It has nothing to do with terror. It will, very obviously, worsen our struggle against al-Qaeda, because it will give al-Qaeda many new recruits. And we’ll lose the cooperation of Muslim countries that we — as in Indonesia, that we must have in moving against al-Qaeda. So it will hurt the war against terror. I think it has nothing to do with proliferation. I think it has to do with oil. And beyond that, world —

AMY GOODMAN: Oil. When you say oil.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Oil, oil. Well, we know oil, with Iraq having the second-largest reserves in the world, but also being a base in the Middle East for improving our control over Saudi Arabia, which is getting — been getting a bit out of hand with us a little later — a little recently, and getting back the control of the oil of Iran and other places that we had in the '20s and ’30s, but that we got a little away from us in the last 10 years. We want to — “we,” that is, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, and with them, Bush — I believe, want to redraw that map, so that the world's only superpower, which has really gone to their heads now, will have total control of the energy resources of the world, as far away as Venezuela — I think Chávez, there’s plans to remove him again in Venezuela — including deals with Russia, which gives us effective control of that, certainly the Caspian basin, but above all the oil of the Middle East as a basis. You can’t control the world, run the world, without controlling the oil reserves. We want to replace the current dictators that we’ve tolerated on the whole so far with our dictators in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: And Saddam was one of, quote, “our dictators.”

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Saddam was one of ours, of course, before, just as Noriega was before he got out of hand in Panama, or Diem was, before we had him assassinated.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, The New York Times came out with a report on the post-Iraq, a post-Saddam Iraq, where a U.S. military man would be in charge, and particularly in charge of the second-largest oil reserves in the world, determining who would get oil contracts and who wouldn’t, be in charge of the oil spoils, as well as governing Iraq.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Exactly. People in this country, I think, are understandably perplexed, as, you know, we could buy the oil anyway. What is this access to oil? It’s not a question of access to oil. It’s a question of having, first, for a lot of firms, the profits of finding the oil, producing it, distributing it, controlling it, but, above all, for the world, for the world power position of being in control of other people’s oil that they get through us.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think, perhaps, the difference today is that, then, in Vietnam, you had a press that was less compliant, that was balking, that was moving against the war? And that right now — I mean, I’m not seeing you on television very much. In fact, I haven’t seen you on television. Maybe I haven’t been watching the right programs.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: If you want to know, I was scheduled yesterday, for several months, to start my book tour with the Today show. It was on —

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, congratulations.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, well, don’t congratulate now, because that was cancelled about two weeks ago. I don’t know why.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s, I guess, the very point, is that we don’t see you on television. We —

DANIEL ELLSBERG: There is, of course, now the internet. There’s not only Pacifica Radio, which is crucial, but there is the internet. I particularly follow a libertarian site called www.antiwar.com, that I find gets very good stuff from all over the world, all over this country. There is a net site called CommonDreams.net. My son has set up —

AMY GOODMAN: Dot-org.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: — my own website, called Ellsberg.net, that puts in a lot of outtakes from his book. This book, by the way, is not my life. It’s only nine or 11 years of my life, dealing with Vietnam. But a lot of — it would have been two or three times as long, but a lot of the stuff will be now on the Ellsberg.net website instead.

AMY GOODMAN: But I want to get to perhaps what’s protecting Bush right now, when many people are scratching their heads and saying, “Is it just about world domination and oil?” It’s that the press is protecting Bush, so that when he has to deal with there’s a sniper on the loose in his backyard that all of the country’s military and police cannot locate, that you have the situation that you do, with Osama bin Laden not being found, Mullah Mohammad Omar not being found, and now he sets his sights on Iraq. He looks out of control, until the press starts spinning it much better than the paid spinmeisters of the Pentagon or the White House, is to watch those on TV and read in the press them spin him to dignity.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: It’s certainly not the case, Amy, that the press is more compliant than they were in Vietnam. They were awfully compliant in Vietnam. They were very bad on the Washington end of things. What was good was some individual reporting from Vietnam by people like Gloria Emerson and Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, who were often in trouble with their own newspapers, Time reporters who were fired by their newspapers, or their magazine, for putting it out. So, it was pretty compliant, and it’s pretty compliant now.

There’s always a rally-around-the-flag effect, which, of course, I believe that Bush is exploiting from 9/11. There is a genuine danger in this country from al-Qaeda. And he’s exploiting that to worsen that danger, in actual fact, by using it to move in a much more global direction.

You know, when I look at George Bush on television, I think of — and this is something that applies now to America as a whole — I think of the story of the emperor’s new clothes. In this country, in this country, we can afford to say and think our leader is a buffoon, our leader has no clothes. What we can’t allow ourselves to see or to say is that he’s an emperor. The idea that we live in an empire just, with the compliance of media, is so foreign to our ideas. The idea that we could commit aggressive war, this is our first aggressive war, people are saying that. U.S. Grant said that the Mexican War was the most unjust war ever committed by a U.S. president. Lincoln, at that time in the Congress, his one term, saw it as a clearly presidential war, which the president had deliberately provoked, as U.S. Grant, later president, commander, said exactly. Polk had provoked that war by moving our troops down to where they were eventually fired on by Mexicans, and then he could move Congress and to acquire half of Mexico.

You started this program earlier with a word I haven’t heard since I was a little kid: “Zamboanga.” Now, I grew up on a little ditty, “The monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga.” Have you ever heard?

AMY GOODMAN: No.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: “The monkeys have no tails. They were bitten off by whales. So the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga.” Now, that was a ditty of American soldiers from my father’s youth, the savage counterinsurgency program against Philippine independence in the start of the century in Zamboanga. The 45, which I was rather proud of, I became expert with, with both the left hand and the right hand, in the Marine Corps, hard to fire that. It’s a very heavy weapon, which you really can’t hit anything with, except at the closest range. It was developed during the Philippine war against the savage, maddened moralists, the nationalists of the Philippines, because nothing else would stop them in their mad suicidal dash against the Marines.

In other words, we’ve been an empire for a long time, but we haven’t admitted it so clearly until now, and not even now. You can’t understand what’s happening unless you see it in terms of imperial policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, in this last minute, what would you say to your former colleagues, those that are in the Pentagon right now, or those who you handed the papers over to in the establishment press.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: In '69, I read a statement by Thoreau — I quote it here on page 263 of this book, I'd recommend to people — against the Mexican War, for which he had gone to jail. He said it was a war of aggression. He said it was not enough to cast a cheap vote against it. He said, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” And that burned in my mind. And when I saw people going to prison to do it, I said, “Cast your whole vote,” which is what I tried to do, what Senator Byrd is doing, what others are doing. I would say to people in the government now, if any of them listen to Pacifica, which would be wonderful, I would say, “Consider doing now what I wish I had done in ’64 or ’65. If you know the president is lying us into a reckless war, go to Congress and the press with documents.”

AMY GOODMAN: And the invitation stands. Come to us. Dan Ellsberg, thanks for being with us, an American patriot. He’s written the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

And that does it for today’s program. Tomorrow, our hour with Michael Moore. He’ll be joining us to the firehouse studio. And if you’ve got questions or comments for him, we’ll play them. You can call us and leave your comments on our line at 212-209-2999, 212-209-2999. And if you’d like to get a video of today’s program with Dan Ellsberg, you can call 1-800-881-2359, video or audio, 1-800-881-2359. Democracy Now! produced by Angie Karran, Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Alex Wolfe, Ana Nogueira and Mike Di Filippo, our engineer, music maestro. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.