Daniel Ellsberg: Whistleblowers Save Our Democracy
By The Real News Network
26 September 19
Trump has been exposed by leakers and might face consequences, and Edward
Snowden has published a book. Daniel Ellsberg reflects on the bravery of
exposing the truth.
DWARD SNOWDEN: It's not enough to believe in something. You have to be ready
to stand for something if you want it to change. And so that is what I hope
this book will help people come to decide for themselves. Are you ready for
this to change?
MARC STEINER: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Marc Steiner. Good to
have you all with us.
Edward Snowden defines whistleblowing for this generation. Whistleblowing is
back in the news, obviously, if it ever left. An unnamed whistleblower,
blowers, have accused Trump of divulging secrets to a foreign leader.
Another that he tried to get dirt on Biden from the leader of the Ukraine.
Edward Snowden is back in the news with a new book and the reality he faces
that the US government may seize the proceeds he may get from that book.
We don't know the names of the whistleblowers in Trump's administration and
his world, but we do know that whistleblowing has been ongoing in this
country since its founding. In her new book Whistleblowers: Honesty in
America from Washington and Trump, political scientist Allison Stanger in an
article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker argues that Americans support
whistleblowing in theory, but in practice they treat whistleblowers badly.
They also tend not to like them. Her quote was, "Whistleblowers are by
definition troublemakers. For that reason, they can be difficult people." Is
that really true? What does that mean? And so what do we make of Snowden's
book and the latest revelations about Trump, and why the power of the
whistleblower can transform how we see ourselves and how we see power.
We talk with one of our most famous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg, who
brought truth to light when he released the Pentagon Papers in 1971,
revealing secrets about the Vietnam War that changed the nature of that war
and our time. Daniel Ellsberg, welcome. Good to have you with us.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Good to be here. Thank you.
MARC STEINER: Let's start with Snowden and what he had to say and the role
he played. I know you two are close. He's part of your foundation- chairman
of the board I think, if I'm correct, as you said before we went on air. So
talk a bit about where Snowden is now, this book and this period we seem to
find ourselves in.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Snowden is a hero of mine as well as a friend, as is
Chelsea Manning is a hero. The person who is in the news right now is being
a little cautious and playing by the rules in a way that neither Manning or
Snowden nor I did. And the difference that makes so far is that his
information hasn't actually gotten out to the Congress or to the public. He
or she went to the Inspector General, as the rules inside call on them to do
with a complaint. And we notice that as of now, it's really not out.
Now, if the information is as urgent and timely and compelling as the
Inspector General apparently found it to be and as the leaker - or not yet a
leaker, we'll call a whistleblower feels, the time may come if there's no
other way to get the information out for them to give it directly to
Congress or the press or the public. They haven't done that yet, unlike
Snowden, and Snowden's information got out. We don't yet know what this a
whistleblower has to tell us. So the time will come, as I say, when they
faced the exact challenge that Ed Snowden made very soberly at the beginning
of your program. Is she or he willing to take a risk in their personal lives
and their career, even possibly a risk of prison to get this information to
the American people? And if it is as important as they seem to feel, then
they should definitely face the possibility, I would say, of paying a very
high personal cost to get it to the public.
MARC STEINER: And that's the part we don't always kind of understand
completely, the personal costs of why people will step over that line. I've
interviewed Chelsea Manning a number of times, and I'm clearly absolutely
familiar with your work and Snowden's work. But your work moved my
generation in a very deep way back in the early '70s. And so talk about
crossing that line and what that means politically, and what that means for
transforming how we view our own society.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Nearly every whistleblower who's by definition revealing
some wrongdoing or dangerous practice by their own team, their agency, their
department, their government, the executive branch to the public is doing
something that their bosses don't want to happen. That's virtually by
definition. Otherwise, they would have put it out themselves. And so they'll
take extreme steps to keep that information from getting out there and keep
the whistleblower from succeeding in getting out, if that's what they're
trying, and to punish them as an example to others. It's not sheer revenge.
It's a question of deterring others from doing the same. So they can expect
very strong efforts at retaliation, and laws passed by Congress supposedly
to protect whistleblowers have not done so in the effect in the past. In
fact, giving your information to a boss, your agency, or up through the
channels, or to an inspector general has generally had the effect simply
revealing your complaint to your bosses and allowing them to isolate you
from further information, fire you, punish you, do various things. So it has
not actually - very rarely has it actually protected the whistleblower from
retaliation.
Now, probably the least dangerously of actually getting the information out
is to go directly to the press, now the internet, perhaps Wikileaks, or just
put it on the net as various people could have done, or go to the press. My
outfit, the Freedom of Press Board, in which Ed Snowden is now the chairman,
as he has promulgated enciphering cyber ability for people to get this in a
coded form into newspapers. And a lot of newspapers use that now. But if you
just go to the Inspector General, the situation in this current prospective
whistleblower, an attempting whistleblower, has not yet succeeded in getting
the information out.
They're in somewhat of a bind now because having gone to the Inspector
General with this complaint, there's no chance for them to be anonymous. And
if they then proceed to go to the press in frustration and getting ripped up
because Inspector General knows who is trying to put this out. It could even
be a, in some cases it has been, a mistake in this sense. A number of people
in the National Security Agency, like Snowden was at one point, a number of
them, Tom Drake, Bill Binney. Kurt Wevey, Ed Lewis made complaints to the
Inspector General and also the Congress. Then, when somebody revealed the
widespread surveillance of which they were aware but with which they had not
leaked to the press, when someone did it, actually Thomas Tamm was one.
And then years later when Ed Snowden gave the actual - identifying himself,
they immediately suspected Tom Drake and the others of having given this
since they had made the complaint, and they actually hadn't. So their
careers were totally disrupted by the way they moved, which was within
channels. They would have done better I could say practically speaking to
have gone anonymously in the first instance to the press, and then we would
have had their information years before Ed Snowden revealed it.
MARC STEINER: So you know, in many ways when you look at-A couple of quick
questions here, when I was thinking about this. When you released the
Pentagon Papers and then of course that led to Watergate and trying to get
information on you to come after you. If these allegations are true, what
Trump allegedly did, this was-
DANIEL ELLSBERG: We don't have the content in detail yet at all. We only
have speculation.
MARC STEINER: Exactly right. Well, suppose that speculation was real, what
would that mean?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, what has leaked out so far, and I'm not clear just
what the basis for it is so far. Somebody must've been talking more than
they were officially allowed to do, but it implies that the president was
using the power of his office to hold a $250 million aid deal in bands and
pressuring Zelensky of Ukraine to help investigate and smear Joe Biden and
his son in preparation for the election. And clearly then, using his office
and the powers of his office for his personal benefit of getting reelected.
Now, truthfully, that's pretty much what presidents do all the time. In this
particular case, there's the unusual aspect to asking a foreign government
to help in that. I would say the people who are treating this as if this is
slightly unprecedented and unimaginable kind of thing are either ignorant of
our history, which is quite possible, or being disingenuous because there's
no question Nixon, for example, did exactly the same as a candidate in 1968.
Many others have done this in various ways.
That doesn't make it legal or constitutional. It does mean in this case that
he may have gotten caught thanks to somebody ringing the bell here or
blowing the whistle. And they say whether we really learn enough to
constitute this, to know enough to see this as an impeachable offense, it
does look it's going to depend on that whistleblower taking thee further
risk, a real risk, of going directly to Congress or to the press. Well,
there would be a real risk in doing that and it could be very much a risk
worth taking.
MARC STEINER: So I'm curious as we kind of wind down here a little bit in
our conversation that when you released the Pentagon Papers and were
exonerated legally-
DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, I couldn't be exonerated. My trial lead to a mistrial.
It was then acquitted.
MARC STEINER: [crosstalk] That's right. Right.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Because of government criminality in trying to blackmail me
from keeping other information. By the way, if whoever does know in the
administration who the person is, the whistleblower-And I use that term a
little cautiously here because so far, they haven't really gone outside
channels. They haven't gone outside of their agency so far to bring that
information public, and it hasn't become public. So let's just say it's an
attempted whistleblower here so far.
MARC STEINER: Right.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, we can be sure that whoever knows that identity and
connected with Trump White House, will be bringing extreme pressure to
appear to keep them from further going further in revelations. I think, for
example, Ed Snowden, if they could have found him, and he was in Hong Kong,
well advisedly out of the country when the revelations came up. But If they
could have identified him, found him before he actually identified himself
and before it had all become public, he would have been in considerable
danger of his life, I believe.
In fact, I can say that personally because Richard Nixon sent a dozen CIA
assets, so-called, former Bay of Pigs veterans, Cuban Americans, to come up
and incapacitate me totally on the steps of the Capitol. And the prosecutor,
their prosecutor, was sure that meant to kill me. I'm not so sure he did
mean to kill me. I think they wanted to shut me up and make sure I didn't
tell any further secrets on Nixon himself. So when I said at the time that
they were looking for Snowden, that he was endanger of his life, some people
thought I was off the wall on that. I had to say you're looking at somebody
who actually was in danger more than I knew at the time from the White
House.
MARC STEINER: Yeah. This whole way we look at this thing in this society at
large, it's patriot-trader. Which one is it and who are you? And I think
that it seems that it's gotten, in the last 40 years, even more dangerous in
some ways for people to become whistleblowers. People are really being
prosecuted, put in prison for these things.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: [inaudible] the only person who was prosecuted for doing
that under the Espionage Act. No one had ever been prosecuted under any law
before for leaking to the American public. Now, I got used to headlines
about me, interviews with me or profiles for whatever with the heading,
"Patriot or Traitor."
MARC STEINER: Right.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: "Trader or hero," or whatever. And it was very dismaying to
me to realize that there really were so many people in the country who
imagined telling the truth to your fellow citizens can be treason. That's
not true under our Constitution. In fact, we fought a revolution in part to
change the system in which criticizing a king was seditious libel or
treason, and you could be drawn and quartered for it. Actually, remember,
this country was founded by traders. Every single one of them liable to be
hanged if they'd been caught after 1776 for signing the Declaration of
Independence, and they discovered a different loyalty to a country where
telling the truth is not treason.
MARC STEINER: And telling the truth and exposing the lies that may happen
around us, I mean, if we look at the right way, it strengthens our
democracy, and who we are and what our future might be.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: If you're not able to do that, you don't have a democracy.
So it is democracy in action, the ability to criticize and to inform your
fellow citizens what they need to know to be the sovereign public, to hold
officials accountable. People say voting is the only remedy in this case,
but what does voting mean if you don't have the information on which to
evaluate a candidate or compare them to someone else? It means it's a
disguised monarchy actually. We're back to George III, and that the
revolution was rescinded in effect. We have a president right now, I think,
who doesn't believe at all in the Constitution or what it meant to have a
government different from that of Imperial Britain.
MARC STEINER: Well, I want to thank you for being you, Daniel Ellsberg and
for Mr. Snowden and Chelsea Manning and the rest. I thank you for taking
your time once again with The Real News. It's always a pleasure to have you
with us. I look forward to doing it again, I hope.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Mm-hmm. Good.
MARC STEINER: And I'm Marc Steiner here with The Real News Network. We'll
stay on top of this and keep whistleblowing out in front. Take care.
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