Daniel Ellsberg's Advice for How to Stop Current and Future Wars
An Iraqi prisoner of war comforts his 4-year-old son at a regroupment center
for POWs near An Najaf after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. (Jean-Marc
Bouju / AP)
Daniel Ellsberg has a message that managers of the warfare state don't want
people to hear.
"If you have information that bears on deception or illegality in pursuing
wrongful policies or an aggressive war," he said in a statement released
last week, "don't wait to put that out and think about it, consider acting
in a timely way at whatever cost to yourself. . Do what Katharine Gun did."
If you don't know what Katharine Gun did, chalk that up to the media power
of the war system.
Ellsberg's video statement went public as this month began, just before the
15th anniversary of the revelation by a British newspaper, the Observer, of
a secret NSA memo-thanks to Katharine Gun. At the UK's intelligence agency
GCHQ, about 100 people received the same email memo from the National
Security Agency on the last day of January 2003, seven weeks before the
invasion of Iraq got underway. Only Katharine Gun, at great personal risk,
decided to leak the document.
If more people had taken such risks in early 2003, the Iraq War might have
been prevented. If more people were willing to take such risks in 2018, the
current military slaughter in several nations, mainly funded by U.S.
taxpayers, might be curtailed if not stopped. Blockage of information about
past whistleblowing deprives the public of inspiring role models.
That's the kind of reality George Orwell was referring to when he wrote:
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past."
Fifteen years ago, "I find myself reading on my computer from the Observer
the most extraordinary leak, or unauthorized disclosure, of classified
information that I'd ever seen," Ellsberg recalled, "and that definitely
included and surpassed my own disclosure of top-secret information, a
history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam years earlier." The Pentagon
Papers whistleblower instantly recognized that, in the Observer article, "I
was looking at something that was clearly classified much higher than top
secret. . It was an operational cable having to do with how to conduct
communications intelligence."
What Ellsberg read in the newspaper story "was a cable from the NSA asking
GCHQ to help in the intercepting of communications, and that implied both
office and home communications, of every member of the Security Council of
the UN. Now, why would NSA need GCHQ to do that? Because a condition of
having the UN headquarters and the Security Council in the U.S. in New York
was that the U.S. intelligence agencies promised or were required not to
conduct intelligence on members of the UN. Well, of course, they want that.
So they rely on their allies, the buddies, in the British to commit these
criminal acts for them. And with this clearly I thought someone very high in
access in Britain intelligence services must dissent from what was already
clear the path to an illegal war."
But actually, the leak didn't come from "someone very high" in GCHQ. The
whistleblower turned out to be a 28-year-old linguist and analyst at the
agency, Katharine Gun, who had chosen to intervene against the march to war.
As Gun has recounted, she and other GCHQ employees "received an email from a
senior official at the National Security Agency. It said the agency was
'mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council members,'
and that it wanted 'the whole gamut of information that could give U.S.
policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head
off surprises.' "
In other words, the U.S. and British governments wanted to eavesdrop on key
UN delegations and then manipulate or even blackmail them into voting for
war.
Katharine Gun took action: "I was furious when I read that email and leaked
it. Soon afterward, when the Observer ran a front-page story-'U.S. dirty
tricks to win vote on Iraq war'-I confessed to the leak and was arrested on
suspicion of the breach of section 1 of the Official Secrets Act."
The whistleblowing occurred in real time. "This was not history," as
Ellsberg put it. "This was a current cable, I could see immediately from the
date, and it was before the war had actually started against Iraq. And the
clear purpose of it was to induce the support of the Security Council
members to support a new UN resolution for the invasion of Iraq."
The eavesdropping was aimed at gaining a second-and this time
unequivocal-Security Council resolution in support of an invasion. "British
involvement in this would be illegal without a second resolution," Ellsberg
said. "How are they going to get that? Obviously, essentially by blackmail
and intimidation, by knowing the private wants and embarrassments, possible
embarrassments, of people on the Security Council, or their aides, and so
forth. The idea was, in effect, to coerce their vote."
Katharine Gun foiled that plan. While scarcely reported in the U.S. media
(despite cutting-edge news releases produced by my colleagues at the
Institute for Public Accuracy beginning in early March of 2003), the
revelations published by the Observer caused huge media coverage across much
of the globe-and sparked outrage in several countries with seats on the
Security Council.
"In the rest of the world, there was great interest in the fact that
American intelligence agencies were interfering with their policies of their
representatives in the Security Council," Ellsberg noted. A result was that
for some governments on the Security Council at the time, the leak "made it
impossible for their representatives to support the U.S. wish to legitimize
this clear case of aggression against Iraq. So the U.S. had to give up its
plan to get a supporting vote in the UN." The U.S. and British governments
"went ahead anyway, but without the legitimating precedent of an aggressive
war that would have had, I think, many consequences later."
Ellsberg said: "What was most striking then and still to me about this
disclosure was that the young woman who looked at this cable coming across
her computer in GCHQ acted almost immediately on what she saw was the
pursuit of an illegal war by illegal means. . I've often been asked, is
there anything about the release of the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam that you
regret. And my answer is yes, very much. I regret that I didn't put out the
top-secret documents available to me in the Pentagon in 1964, years before I
actually gave them to the Senate and then to the newspapers. Years of war
and years of bombing. It wasn't that I was considering that all that time. I
didn't have a precedent to instruct me on that at that point. But in any
case, I could have been much more effective in averting that war if I'd
acted much sooner."
Katharine Gun "was not dealing only with historical material," Ellsberg
emphasizes, she "was acting in a timely fashion very quickly on her right
judgement that what she was being asked to participate in was wrong. I
salute her. She's my hero. I think she's a model for other whistleblowers.
And for a long time I've said to people in her position or my old position
in the government: Don't do what I did. Don't wait till the bombs are
falling or thousands more have died."
By making her choice, Gun risked two years of imprisonment. In Ellsberg's
words, she seemed to be facing "a sure conviction-except that the government
was not willing to have the legality of that war discussed in a courtroom,
and in the end dropped the charges."
As this month began, Katharine Gun spoke at a London news conference,
co-sponsored by ExposeFacts and RootsAction.org (organizations I'm part of)
and hosted by the National Union of Journalists. Speaking alongside her were
three other whistleblowers-Thomas Drake, Matthew Hoh and Jesselyn Radack-who
have emerged as eloquent American truth tellers from the NSA, State
Department and Justice Department. The presentations by the four are
stunning to watch.
Their initiatives, taken at great personal risk, underscore how we can seize
the time to make use of opportunities for forthright actions of conscience.
This truth is far from confined to what we call whistleblowing. It's about
possibilities in a world where silence is so often consent to what's wrong,
and disruption of injustice is imperative for creating a more humane future.
Norman Solomon
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group
RootsAction.org...