A NYT interview with Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (91) has terminal cancer, with about 3-6 months left to live. In 1971, he gave copies of the US military’s secret 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times and The Washington Post. The government tried to stop publication, but the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment right of a free press against prior restraint. That led to public anger at the government for lying about the conduct of the war. Ellsberg faced criminal charges, e.g., violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but government misconduct caused the charges to be dismissed. 

Here are couple of the Qs and As from the NYT interview:  

Q. As you look around the world today, what scares you?

A. I’m leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better during my years. President Biden is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time, with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s not the world I hoped to see in 2023. And that’s where it is. I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen.

Q. The number of people with the security clearances to view classified material has expanded, perhaps exponentially, since the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and I wonder, aside from a few people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, why haven’t there been more Dan Ellsbergs? Why aren’t there more people who, when presented with evidence of something that they find morally objectionable, disclose it?

A. Why aren’t there more? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, “Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting.” The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences.

Before my case and the Obama administration’s prosecutions of whistle-blowers, they needn’t have been worried about going to jail. But apart from that, they fear losing their jobs, their careers, risking the clearances on which their jobs depend. People who have these clearances have often invested a lifetime in demonstrating that they can be entrusted to keep secrets. That trust becomes a part of your identity, which it is difficult to sacrifice, so that one loses track of a sense of higher responsibility — as a citizen, as a human being.

Q. We tend to think of the classification system as a system of protection. But you sometimes talk about it, and I think correctly, as a system of control.

A. That is what it is. It is a protection system against the revelation of mistakes, false predictions, embarrassments of various kinds and maybe even crimes. And then the secrecy system in its application is predominantly to protect officials, administrations from embarrassment and from accountability, from the possibility that their rivals will pick these things up and beat them over the head with it. Their rivals for office, for instance.

....

The media as a whole has never really investigated the secrecy system and what it’s for and what its effects are. For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, 10 years, 20 years to make public. Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all. An expert estimated in Congress in 1971 that 5 percent of classified information met the criteria for secrecy at the time it was classified, and after a few years that decreased to half of one percent. 

....  

As I said, my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude. 

Ellsberg's arguments seem sound to me. The threat of nuclear war is frighteningly high, we're not going to deal responsibly and seriously with climate change, and the US government lies far too much to us by unwarranted opacity. Unwarranted secrecy threatens democracy and the rule of law. 

Ellsberg explains his fear of nuclear war by arguing that nuclear weapons have been used many times since 1945, including now by both sides in Ukraine.* Their use is threats of use akin to a bank robber threatening to use a gun. Even if the robber doesn’t pull the trigger one time, they might the next. Ellsberg comments on that: "But eventually, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out."

* I am unaware of Ukraine threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, but Russia has made the threat against Ukraine.