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Transcript of Ellsberg on CNN Newsnight with Aaron Brown, 10/18/02
BROWN: We came across some quotes from the President arguing for military action. "Our credibility is at stake," he said. "The dangers involved action is less than the danger resulting from inaction. Creating a free and democratic nation is essential to America's security." It sounds like some of the things we've been hearing from President Bush of late, but this it was Lyndon Johnson, and the nation was Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg, for one, believes we risk forgetting the lessons of that terrible war as we consider the prospects of a new one in Iraq. We should add Mr. Ellsberg has a new book out "Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." We are pleased to welcome him to the program. It's nice to see you. You are a little hoarse tonight, so we'll bear with you.
I want to talk about Vietnam and the papers for a bit. Did it ever occur to you that what you were doing, as strongly as you believed it was right, might be wrong, that you might, in fact, be doing great damage to the country? That ever hit your mind?
ELLSBERG: I read the papers. I knew these documents. I was one of the first who read all of them. I'd worked for the government for 15 years as a Marine and as a consultant and in the pentagon. I knew these documents should have been made public to Congress and to the press years before. And I knew I should have done it.
BROWN: And you never thought that your wisdom and your conscience, as sharp as you are and as good as you are, that that judgment might be wrong? And that the judgment of five presidents and countless secretaries of defense and the list goes on might, in fact, have had the country's best interests in mind?
ELLSBERG: First, of course, I can always be wrong. I'm human just like those presidents. And I know I've been wrong many times before, and I'll be wrong again. There's never been a time when I was sure I was right, except that I felt pretty sure that I'd been wrong to keep my mouth shut so long when Congress was being lied into a reckless gamble, into an unnecessary war and a wrongful war. You know, I used to be asked that question an awful lot right after the papers came out. That was 30 years ago. "What gave you the right to make this decision on your own?" And I used to ask myself, I wonder why I never got asked the question that I have to ask myself: "What gave me the right to conceal that so long? What gave anyone in the executive branch the right, when they knew that the country was being lied into this war?" I don't think I was-I wasn't elected. But I didn't really take-I took an oath to uphold the constitution, and what we were doing was clearly not constitutional.
BROWN: All right. Let's fast forward and try and bring these two things together as much as they fit together. In some ways they don't. There are lots of people who oppose the president's way about doing this. But, at the same time-we've had him on this week in fact-who will. . .
ELLSBERG: You're talking about history or today?
BROWN: No, today. I'm sorry, today, in talking about Iraq.
ELLSBERG: It is very hard because I feel that I'm waking up to the world I left 30 years ago.
BROWN: But don't you-don't you see a difference between a Vietnam of 1960 and an Iraq of today? They are not the same, are they?
ELLSBERG: Oh, no. Their language is different; religion is different. There's lots of-actually, there are lots of differences. For example. . .
BROWN: No, but I mean the threat is different.
ELLSBERG: We are facing a very serious threat today from al Qaeda. According to the CIA director, George Tenet, which he-I give him credit for saying in an unclassified letter to Congress-he said Saddam Hussein is a threat to his own people. He surely is. He is a tyrant. He's even a monster, like a lot of others, but that doesn't excuse him. He is not a threat to us unless he is attacked. He's not behind al Qaeda, as far as the CIA can make out, and as far as the Senate Intelligence Committee can make out, and statements to the contrary by Vice President Cheney and President Bush appear to be without any basis.
BROWN: We've got about a half a minute left. Do you think there is-is it your view then that there is some hidden agenda here?
ELLSBERG: Well, I feel confident that the reasons being given for this war by the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, they can't be right. They're contradicted by everything that comes out from the Senate Intelligence Committee, from the CIA and so forth. So we have to look for other reasons. That's, by the way, part of the job. That's what I did when I worked for presidents. They-the message of my book and of the Pentagon Papers, unfortunately, is that officials, like me and my bosses did, lie and conceal far more than any outsider can even imagine.
But there is another side to that. It's possible to tell the truth. The message I would like to get to people inside right now: if they feel that what the President and the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense are saying is deceptive of the public, is not founded on the evidence that they know passing across their desks or they know, by expertise, I would like them to consider doing what I wish I'd done in 1964 and 1965, rather than waiting five years, as I did until 1969. They should consider going to Congress and the press and telling the truth with documents. They shouldn't do what I did, wait until the bombs are falling. That's why I think the message in my book is urgent. So urgent, in fact, that I decided to put the first chapter on the internet tonight on Ellsberg.net. You don't have to buy the book to read that. That tells us what is happening right now. It's about the week that Congress passed the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution, having now-this is the time to read it, when they've just passed the second one.
BROWN: Mr. Ellsberg, it's nice to meet you. Thanks for coming in tonight. Good luck.
ELLSBERG: Thank you. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20021022/784f1b92/attachment.htm>