UPDATED: March 9, 11:42 a.m.

Best known for risking his life to leak classified documents, free speech advocate Daniel Ellsberg doesn’t regret releasing the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971. What he does regret is not releasing them sooner.

It is a heavy burden to consider whether he could have prevented the Vietnam War and saved 58,000 people, he said to a packed audience in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Tuesday.

‘What if I had put out everything before the election? During the time (former President Lyndon) Johnson was running on the grounds ‘We seek no wider war’ — which was a lie, and I had the information to prove it,’ Ellsberg said.

Professor Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center of Free Speech, arranged the event, titled ‘From the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg.’ Throughout the two and a half hour conversation, Gutterman posed questions to Ellsberg, who spoke about topics including WikiLeaks, the definition of treason and regrets he has about the timing of the release of the Pentagon Papers.

Ellsberg discussed the parallels between the Pentagon Papers affair and the recent issue concerning Bradley Manning, a soldier of the U.S Army who leaked top-secret information to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is the first major leak since the Pentagon Papers.

‘It’s striking how resemblant my situation is to current events because (former President Richard) Nixon’s statements toward me echo the charges of Bradley,’ Ellsberg said. 

Ellsberg began his comparison by listing the current charges against Manning, particularly ‘aiding the enemy.’

‘When Nixon said that exact phrase to me, he meant to say I was a traitor,’ Ellsberg said. ‘Treason is defined in the Constitution as waging war against the United States or adhering to its enemies. To suggest that he adhered to the enemy would be absurd.’

Ellsberg said he first realized he had to take action against the Vietnam War during the war’s early stages when he attended a War Resisters League meeting. He was curious about the Gandhi- and Martin Luther King Jr.-like lifestyles of the league members and met at the meeting a young man on his way to prison for refusing to cooperate with the draft.

‘I was so thunderstruck by this that I went behind the auditorium and I cried, thinking this is what our country has come to,’ Ellsberg said, surprised to see someone who would rather see a person go to prison than fight for his or her country.

It was after this that Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers, he said.

In 1967, Ellsberg, who worked as a consultant to the White House and the Defense Department, had been assigned to work on the McNamara Study, a classified look at decisions the United States made in the Vietnam War. Two years later, he made copies of the study, which he had kept in a safe, and handed them over to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The New York Times and the Washington Post.

It is considered to be the largest unauthorized leak in American history and caused the government to sue the press for the first time ever to stop the press from publishing the information in fear of shaking national security. Ellsberg was proven innocent by the Supreme Court and escaped a possible 115-year sentence.

In Manning’s documents, there are hundreds of incidents in which American officials turned prisoners over to other countries, fully aware the prisoners would be tortured, Ellsberg said. It is just as illegal to turn people over as it is for a country to torture prisoners, Ellsberg said. 

For each case in Manning’s documents, the command was given to ‘not investigate any further,’ yet it was Manning’s legal obligation to do the exact opposite in this moral issue, Ellsberg said. He said Manning was the one person who acted legally, and he is facing prison time for it.

Ellsberg said he is thankful WikiLeaks took place, although he had to wait 40 years for an event similar to the Pentagon Papers affair to occur. 

‘It’s a high personal price to tell the truth, and I waited a long time to see it again. So I was impressed,’ Ellsberg said.

Jaime Riccio, a graduate student in Newhouse, said she found it interesting to hear about the Pentagon Papers, given the situation with WikiLeaks.

‘I really felt what he said was very pertinent and that it gave great insight into WikiLeaks due to the historical background,’ Riccio said.

Jacquie Greco, a sophomore in the College of Human Ecology, said she could tell Ellsberg was passionate about the topic.

‘You could tell that Ellsberg thought strongly about what he did,’ Greco said, ‘and that looking back he still feels strongly.’

meltaou@syr.edu

Published on March 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Marwa: meltagou@syr.edu | @marwaeltagouri