Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State
[From a Walter Cronkite interview conducted June 23, 1971, while Ellsberg was in hiding after releasing the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was moving around Boston in safe houses until he could get the entirety of the document published. Once they were wholly published - in 19 newspapers - he surrendered to authorities.]
Cronkite: What about the immediate effect [of these revelations] on the war as of these days in June, 1971?
Ellsberg: Yes, the war is going on.... I hope the Senate will go much further. I hope that they discover that their responsibilities to their citizens, the citizens of this country and to the voters, do go beyond getting re-elected, and that they're men, they're free men who can accept the responsibility of ending this war.
My father had a favorite line from the Bible, which I used to hear a great deal when I was a kid: "The truth shall make you free." And I hope that the truth that's out now--it's out in the press, it's out in homes, where it should be, where voters can discuss it--it's out of the safes, and there is no way, no way to get it back into the safes--I hope that truth will free us of this war. I hope that we will put this war behind us.... In such a way that the history of the next 20 years will read nothing like the history of the last 20 years.
--Daniel Ellsberg
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
This is the final installment of a six-part series of conversations with Ellsberg that were conducted earlier this month. My questions are in boldface, Ellsberg's responses are in lightface. Topics and dates of future and past postings can be found at the end of this interview.
One of the more poignant parts of your book is your interview with Cronkite, in which you say you hope that what you did in releasing the Pentagon Papers was to ensure that the next 20 years of history would read nothing like the past 20 years. Now maybe your 20 years was off ....
What I said at the time was that I hope the history will be very different. I don't recall having any great confidence. There is no question in my mind that our problems are very systemic. The degree to which it's working out now as a replay of Vietnam - and of course, there are differences - is kind of uncanny.
I think on a broader scale, I have much less confidence or hope - though I still do have some hope, but much less confidence - than I used to that people or systems or societies really learn from history in a useful way. In other words, I think the whole idea of learning from history ... well, that's not what humans do very much. I don't think there are a lot of examples of people learning, especially from other people's experience.
One thing I think we should be asking right now is: Could this happen again? Can Iraq happen again? I'm thinking Iran right now. I mean an air attack, not an invasion.
I don't think they can do much about invading Iran without a draft.
They can't invade anybody without a draft.
I'm made really uneasy by a line that I'm seeing from a lot of liberals and even from critics of the war, and that is the emphasis on the unfairness of the volunteer army and the fact that gee, isn't this a terrible situation where a few people are paying enormous risks and an enormous price, and the rest of us are paying no price.
I'll tell you why that makes me very nervous. I think that a case is being made for a draft, and I think it will happen with the approval of our Democratic leaders and many liberal columnists because of this unfairness issue. But it will not happen until there's been a major crisis, another 9/11. Or conceivably a war that came out of our air attack on Iran. So when I talk a short-term attack, an attack on Iran before a 9/11, it would be an air attack.
If we have another 9/11, then I think you do get a draft. I seem to be the only person saying this at this point.
But if you want to put 200,000 or 300,000 more in Iraq- which I believe he would do if he could- he has to wait until he has a draft. So we've got to stop that draft. And people who think that the draft would be a good thing because it will spread the burden and so forth, really have their heads up their ass. You can quote me on that.
It's terribly misguided and that's another thing we might be able to stop. I hope we can stop an attack on Iran - that will be very hard - and I would hope we can build a backfire where even under a 9/11, people will balk at a draft and say that isn't what we need. Because if they give him the draft, not in their minds in order to send more troops over - nobody wants to do that in large numbers - but because they think it will be more fair, what they'd be giving him is a blank check to send hundreds of thousands of troops within a year or two into Iraq and Iran and maybe Syria and North Korea.
If and when there's another 9/11 while Bush is in office, I think he'll get what he wants. And what he wants is - I have a sort of litany of what I think you'd get. Maybe I should just say the list right now.
First, I think you get a new Patriot Act, probably drafted already, that makes the old one look like the Bill of Rights. And the Bill of Rights is gone. Obviously, it hasn't had any reality in the minds of the White House, the administration, as a desideratum, as something to hang onto, since they got in, or since 9/11 anyway.
Second, total surveillance, which apparently we may have right now. When I was saying this a month ago, it wasn't on the assumption that they'd gone as far as it turns out they have. But I did see that happening in the future, as I started thinking 40 years ago, when I had clearances. I knew then that there was no great technical problem in simply turning on the NSA domestically, to listen to the American public the same way they listened to foreign countries. There was just a political problem, you could say a constitutional problem. And the day that they flipped that switch, for whatever reason, we would become a total surveillance society. I would say that switch was flipped, secretly, just after 9/11 (if not before).
I think that what the NSA is probably doing is a massive, massive vacuum cleaner operation here within America as well as in and out, and that we're talking about millions and millions of intercepts. I suspect what we're going to find out is in effect what Admiral Poindexter called Total Information Awareness, that's what was turned on. And the targeted wiretaps--the individual ones that they should have asked the FISA court for warrants on but didn't--are probably illegal for two other reasons as well: They're based on the illegal mass data-mining program, and some of them, probably a lot of them, target journalists, politicians and antiwar activists with no relation to terrorism. I'm guessing that they didn't apply for warrants--or for changing the law--because even the FISA court wouldn't give warrants in these cases, or for data-mining, nor would even a Republican Congress make these legal.
Even before the investigations we need of all this, given the overwhelming prima facie appearance of illegality, there should be senators saying right now, "stop." A lot of them, even Republicans, have uttered the words "illegal," "unconstitutional," "impeachable" about the secret NS programs. but I don't know of one who has gone on to say, "This must be stopped. Right now."
now: This should stop. Right now. While it's being investigated.
Suspend it until we decide it's legal.
Oh, it's illegal. You can't make it legal without changing both existing laws and the Constitution. When it comes to the will and determination of this executive branch to conduct unconstitutional surveillance, the die has been cast, the shift has been made. The question before us now is whether the public and the rest of the government--Congress, courts, the fifth estate--will act to roll that back, fast, or will they sign on? That remains to be seen, soon.
Third, with a big 9/11, I think there will be martial law in large parts of the country if not all of it. Fourth, a broad official secrets act. Add to that an overall surveillance society, and we have a country in which the government has total privacy in terms of secrecy and the public has zero privacy from the government. That is not a democracy. Then the world has the chance to find out what it means to have a superpower not only out of control but one that is totalitarian, a dictatorship.
What's the lesson of the Vietnam War? You don't want a king. And a king in foreign policy is what Nixon thought he was and for practical purposes was acting like. A king is what Bush thinks he is. If you don't like the word, "king," dictator is another word. He said to a questioner recently, "I am not a dictator." Like Nixon's, "I am not a crook."
All this from another 9/11?
And more. Fifth, on a large scale I think we'll see from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands - and I mean plural, hundreds of thousands - of Middle Easterners, Muslims and sympathizers, some non-Muslim dissenters but mostly young Muslim males, in camps or deported. And that will happen without a whole lot of resistance by the public after another 9/11.
Six, a quick renewal of nuclear testing. Not because it has any relevance to any of this but because Bush wants it, the Republicans want it, and he'll get what he wants after that. And the rationale will be: It's a dangerous world, we have to be prepared to hit terrorist underground nuclear storage sites or whatever. It will be a very thin reason, but he'll get it. Nuclear testing. That starts nuclear testing all over the world.
Basically, a police state is what we're talking about. And that's what I'm really afraid of with another 9/11. And then I'll add ... Iran. If Iran hasn't already been hit, it gets hit. And then after you've had the draft for a year or so, invasion of the southern oil fields of Iran, which apparently we were close to doing a couple times in the last 20 years with earlier oil crises. That came up under Kissinger with the oil crisis in 1973, possibly taking the eastern oil fields of Saudi Arabia; later, Iran, after the shah had left.
I think an attack on Iran is fairly likely, and almost sure to have disastrous effects in the Middle East, especially if nuclear weapons are used, above all. But even without that. In Iraq itself I don't think we're facing imminent escalation, unless there's an attack on Iran, which may be imminent. And the police state ... that's as imminent as a new attack Al Queda, I'm afraid.
For that matter, an attack on Iran is a way to get more 9/11's. It's a provocation.
I could even conjecture that that's why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being so provocative about his nuclear program and Israel. I'm not sure he's totally averse to an attack. It would almost surely strengthen him politically.
Well, it did Bush here, didn't it, with 9/11?
Good point. Instead of saying, My god, how could this man let this happen ... You know, that's a good comparison. The way that the administration reasons about attacks on other countries, 9/11 here should have brought about regime change in the U.S., rather than greater popularity for Bush.
Yet it doesn't work that way.
If we had better free press in this country, it would have been known, either beforehand or right after 9/11, how badly he had protected us from that. A totally, incompetent, terrible job as Richard Clarke pointed out. But instead he suffered nothing from that. He won the election three years later and he hadn't protected us. Now, can you protect from terrorism? Total protection, yeah, it's impossible. But could you have done better than Bush did? It's hard to do as badly as that, you know. You really have to work at it, so much so that conspiracy theories have a lot to work with. Can he really be that incompetent and that unaware?
And then, as Clarke points out, when they did finally get his attention with 9/11, he made matters worse by going in exactly the wrong direction, by attacking Iraq. So Clarke's line is, here we have a president who for the first nine months you cannot get his attention for the terrorism problem. He's totally inattentive to it. And then when it got his attention, he made things worse by going into Iraq.
And of course, claiming that no one could have foreseen 9/11.
Interestingly, this president is unusual not only institutionally, but humanly. He'll say anything. "No one foresaw that the levees might breach."
What concerns me is his remark to Woodward at one point that he doesn't care what history says about him because we'll all be dead. I finally reflected that what really bothers me about that besides the stupidity of not learning from history is that he's not afraid of the judgment of history once he's dead. Other presidents at least have had some concern about their legacy and how they will be viewed. I honestly think he doesn't care at all.
Well, let me give you a possible reason for that. We don't know exactly what he believes of Christian fundamentalism. How different are his beliefs, let's say, from Pat Robertson or Billy Graham or James Dobson? I suspect they may be very close. In that case, what he may be thinking is that we, the unsaved, will be dead--in fact, we'll be in hell--before long, but he and the other born-again Christians (only) will not be dead, ever. He and they will be raptured to heaven before he dies, or at least before his children die, within the next 20 to 30 years. So there won't be any history for him to worry about. Any possibly hostile historians will be in eternal hellfire. If this sounds like crazy speculation about his beliefs, google Christian fundamentalism or pre-millenial dispensationalism.
One peculiar thing in Bush's case - it doesn't apply to all dictators - is that he thinks his authority, like that of kinds, is a divine right. That's what he virtually says and I tend to think he does believe it. God put him there. And our rights come from God, Only, they don't come from the Bill of Rights, they don't come from the Revolution, they don't come from court cases or struggle. Our rights come from God and from the Bible, he says. Actually, I wasn't aware of the Bible giving a lot of examples of democracy.
Romans 13. Your rulers are given you by God and you should obey them. It's what he thinks. And when he says that, this is a distinct, peculiar problem we have right now: a president who actually believes that his authority comes to him from someone other than the electorate, whether they voted for him or not, or an election. In fact, a lot of his religious constituency are told by General Boykin, by his high level general in the Defense Department - "My god is a real god, Theirs is an idol."
I think Boykin is still there. One of the things he was saying in uniform to religious constituents was that the election of Bush in the first instance, in the year 2000, without a majority of the voters, was already a measure of God's grace, a miracle. It meant God wanted him there: Look, he didn't even get a majority vote and he's there. They're actually pointing to that as a sign of divine favor.
That is widely believed by the fundamentalists. Now that's pretty dangerous. He's already saying Congress doesn't have a right to rule me as commander in chief, but he clearly goes beyond that. Courts don't. The electorate doesn't. What does that tell us? Nobody does. The UN Charter obviously does not, in his view. Anything else ... treaties mean nothing, no constraints, he's answerable only to God.
How reliable is his channel to God? A God, by the way, who made George Bush our president. (What would that say, to the rest of us, about God?)
He has said on more than one occasion that God told me to attack Saddam Hussein and I did. And I've said to audiences, he was wrong. He was mistaken. That was not God. I feel very sure about this.
I've discovered that I do have some theological preconceptions, more than I would have thought. That's one of them. When you hear a voice you take to be God that tells you to invade a country that has not attacked and is no threat to us, get a second opinion. In this country, from Congress.
I think we should ask that of our president. That principle is in our Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, which if you want a lesson from Vietnam, I would put this one right at the top: it's the war powers clause. And it's Congress shall declare war, not in consultation with the president, not the president with the consent of the Congress. Congress shall declare war.
There are ambiguities there that can be exploited. And it's generally accepted that if it's a question of an ongoing attack or an imminent attack on our forces the president has the right as commander in chief to repel that attack while waiting for approval of Congress and if necessary, the UN. He can claim an immediate self-defense issue and presidents have very often acted on that. But if it's a question of a war, not repelling an attack, then the claim of various presidents - that declaration of war is obsolete and the Congress is no longer the critical decision-maker - should be rejected. That's the lesson I draw now.
That article was put in to keep the president from acting on his own, whoever his advisor is. Going to war on his own, whether his advisor is his wife or Robert McNamara or Karl Rove or God, is not adequate. It's Congress that should make that decision.
I've now come to understand as a former executive official, that was a very wise constitutional provision. The decision to be at war should be in the hands of a large number of people from all over the country who are subject to reelection every two years.
And that the public is aware of debate on it.
There should be public debate. Barbara Lee was exactly right in her lone vote against the initial authorization to attack Afghanistan on the grounds not that it was necessarily wrong to attack the Taliban in that case or Afghanistan, but that it should not be made as a blank check by Congress to the president without hearings and without debate. She was the single person who was right-minded on that. Why was she the one? She has some very interesting answers in the case of her own life history.
But can't we aspire to having more than one? Strictly speaking, she and Dennis Kuchinich the next year did organize 123 to vote against a blank check for war on Iraq. Not enough, but better than one. And 23 Senators in the case of Iraq versus zero the year before. So you can do better.
Can we aspire right now for some Republicans to join Democrats in bill of impeachment? Is that easy? No. Is it impossible? I'm not ready to say that yet. I don't think it's impossible. Could you get a majority or enough of them if the Democrats were all united? That's not impossible. Obviously, very unlikely. But that's what we have to aim at.
I saw an article that said that people as an experiment went to college campuses with some of the Bill of Rights and said will you sign this, saying that you think that this should be the law of the land, and a majority of college students said it was too radical. I think the one they were focusing on was free speech.
A lot of people take these things for granted and assume that we're all committed to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, which is certainly wrong. And rather than say, well, if we discuss this too much and we put it up for a vote - and I would agree, I don't want a constitutional convention on this one - if we put it up for a vote, if we even debate it, you'll get opposition, you know: It will make things worse. Let's just let sleeping dogs lie. Well, this dog ain't sleeping. So I think people should take the president on, on his challenge, on the question of whether 9/11 calls for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Practically speaking, Congress has long accepted that the Cold War and everything since then, the nuclear age, essentially invalidates Article 1, Section 8, the role of Congress on war and foreign policy. They've accepted that and I think they were terribly wrong to do that. A guy that I despised at the time for the Taft-Hartley Bill, Robert Taft, said in 1950, you are setting a terrible precedent here by going into Korea without a declaration from Congress. And I thought, oh, Taft, the isolationist, you know. But he was absolutely right. There's no question in my mind that what I thought was fine at the time was wrong, going in there without a declaration of war. That was a very bad precedent and presidents have relied on it ever since.
You've expressed to me before that you think an official secrets act would be one of the results of another 9/11. How would that affect us?
Here's the difference it would make if we did pass an official secrets act and it was signed. I found in audiences that almost no journalists or lawyers know the following points: (a) that we don't have an official secrets act; (b) that an official secrets act was passed in late October of 2000; and (c) that although it was supported by attorney general Janet Reno in its final form and so was expected to be signed by Clinton in fact, after protesting editorials in just the week after it was passed, he vetoed it. And that's why we don't have an official secrets act. That was the first time it had ever gone to a vote, first time it had been passed, but it wasn't signed. Obviously, Bush would sign now.
The difference that will make is that the treatment of Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper and the others who were brought before the grand jury, that will be standard, daily, until reporters just stop reporting classified information, anything but handouts. What I mean is, in Miller's and Cooper's case, the prosecutor had a clear-cut law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is a narrowly defined official secrets act. Why has Congress legislated that, and two other narrow secrets acts relating to nuclear weapons data and communications intelligence? On the grounds that they deal with a relatively definable, narrow amount of information which generally the public doesn't need to know and which involve a high percentage of cases in which revelation would be damaging to national security. So they say, okay, in these cases we can live with what amounts to that degree of abridgement of the First Amendment. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. Well, these are slight departures from that, compromises - which I generally accept - but no president has yet signed a bill saying that any and every revelation of anything marked classified is criminal.
If they say - as in England and most other coutries - that to leak anything that is classified is a crime, then you have a perfect legal basis for pulling reporters with their byline over that information in front of a grand jury and say, we're not going after you, but a crime has been committed. Just tell us who committed it.
When a broad official secrets act like that gets signed after the next 9/11, then any time there is a leak of classified information or just information that they have all these new categories for, sensitive information, anything, just anything ... it'll be like China, you know. They would like to be like China, where everything is secret. You can't put out anything that's not from official sources essentially. There are people in prison for publishing in Hong Kong an official speech days before it was to be delivered. Well, they would like to have that here.
Well, what can we do? What can we as citizens do?
It occurred to me today that this is a time when you should be having a debate on the republican - small "r" - principles[,] on the requirements of a republic, how we should operate, the way there was a debate from about the 1760's, about 10 years before the revolution. You had this debate that continued not just through 1789 but it continued until at least you had the Bill of Rights ratified. So you had about a 20-year or 30-year period when the country was really saying, What are our rights? What rights do we want? What kind of country do we want? After all, when they started they thought they might have a monarchy.
I have to say with the country as it is today, in the actually existing democracy ... you know the phrase, "actually existing socialism?" Think of the phrase, "actually existing democracy." Well, that's without Article 1, Section 8, for example. That's without Congressional war powers. That's with an awful lot of surveillance going on right now, that's with virtually one party controlling the Congress and the president, that's where we actually are.
How can we prevent this country being turned into a police state by this administration in the next three years? That's what I think is facing us and I have not talked in those terms at any other time in my life. We've already seen that the hope for tying up this administration in various ways prior to another 9/11 has been given us essentially by leaks. The Abu Ghraib leak, the secret prisons, NSA. Plus a demonstration of incompetence and corruption in Katrina. That's a major factor there.
I would say that with actually existing democracy, as it is right now, if there's a big terrorist attack, our actually existing democracy will not protect us against a transition to a police state. I don't believe we will be able to avoid that. I hope I'm wrong. even when I'm certain about something, I'm often wrong. Right now, I'm working with others in hopes of making that prediction wrong.
I think before a police state happens we do have enough to work with that we can have some effect on these other things. Really, I'm a hell of a lot more hopeful than I was four months ago. And the crucial aspect of that has been determined by leaks, and the public's response to them, limited and inconclusive as that has been so far.
We need more leaks, and public pressure for democrats to respond to them as if they were an opposition party--and for some Republicans to respond like Americans more than partisans. That can give us a real chance--which I hardly imagined six months ago--for a Democratic congress in 2006, followed by investigations, impeachment proceedings, new Democratic leaders (not the current ones) in 2008 ... altogether, movement away from an abyss.
Schedule of Ellsberg Interviews at Daily Kos
Part I, January 20, 2006 - The Pentagon Papers and the Overlooked 1968 Leaks: Covers Ellsberg feeling that the Pentagon Papers ultimately proved ineffective in what he was trying to accomplish, but that leaks he did prior to them in 1968 were much more effective.
Part 2, January 21, 2006 - Judith Miller, the New York Times and Government-Controlled Press: Ellsberg speculates that Miller was "on the team" for the CIA - something he witnessed of several reporters during Vietnam - and that to a greater or lesser extent than the public realizes, we are dealing with a controlled press in this country.
Part 3, January 22, 2006 - The Cult of Secrecy in Government and Its Undermining of Democracy: Ellsberg discusses the undermining effects of government secrecy on the working of a practicing democracy, overclassification and the problems of signing oaths of secrecy to get clearances, which routinely leads to lying to Congress and courts during the course of investigations.
Part 4, January 27, 2006 - Whistleblowing and Effective Activism: Ellsberg talks about the hows and whys of whistleblowing - and importantly, when it's NOT worth the personal price - as well as what average American citizens can do to effectively put pressure on the government for change.
Part 5, January 28, 2006 - Iraq/Vietnam Parallels and Other Foreign Policy Fiascos: Ellsberg analyzes the obvious parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the two major differences - oil and strategic geographical importance - which he believes will keep us in Iraq for as long as 50 years.
Part 6, January 29, 2006 - Bush, the Next 9/11 and the Approaching Police State: Ellsberg discusses ... well, the title says it all.
Daniel Ellsberg's website.
