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Originally Posted by Elphaba
This topic will be locked if we don't get back on topic. It's a good subject and I would like to see the discussion continue.
host, isn't it true that congressional members cannot reveal top secret information even to their own collegues? In the single party control that we had in 2002, what should or could the opposition members do to halt the practice of torture? The mainstream press had proven it's lack of interest in the role of watchdog of the administration. I don't see the opportunity for a "Pentagon Papers" type of intervention that has been used in the past.
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Elphaba, I only got to "lick the spoon" of the syrup from the whole bottle that Daniel Ellsberg summoned the courage to swallow, but when you decide to object, the process of deciding is similar. You say "no", and then you act on the "no" decision.
It is about wrestling with your conscience...deciding where to "draw the line", what it will cost you. I was 18. All I had to do was quietly make the decision not to turn myself in to selective service. I was already "in college", and I had an automatic deferment, but I had made up my mind to keep myself off their list of names, because I thought that "they" had forfeited their legitimacy...
I've never met with or discussed what I decided to do, with anyone else who did the same thing.
All I had to do was lie low....I had convictions, and I believed that if everyone did what I decided to do....the war would end, but I could not bring myself to do what Ellsberg decided and what the four members of congress should have decided to do in this instance....become a martyr:
From the Times article in post #10
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.....Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee's top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program. Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy.
"When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath -- one of secrecy," she said. "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything."
Roberts declined to comment on his participation in the briefings. Rockefeller also declined to talk about the briefings, but the West Virginia Democrat's public statements show him leading the push in 2005 for expanded congressional oversight and an investigation of CIA interrogation practices. "I proposed without success, both in committee and on the Senate floor, that the committee undertake an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation activities," Rockefeller said in a statement Friday....
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Daniel Ellsberg:
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http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/peo...sberg98-6.html
The Decision to Protest Publicly
<h3>You remained for many years part of the government, part of the team, willing to live with the elements of this decision making process. After much frustration with Vietnam, after reading the Pentagon Papers, you reached a different conclusion about what is acceptable and what is moral. Explain how that change in your thinking came about.</h3>
I learned in Vietnam nothing very new about the lack of good prospects for success. I went to Vietnam pretty much with that perspective, or certainly I had it in 1964, and I had it 1961. I did learn the faces of the Vietnamese. I learned to be concerned for what happened to Vietnamese people in a way that my colleagues back in Washington probably didn't feel. They had a reality for me. They weren't just numbers and they weren't just abstract ciphers of some kind, as they were for other people. And as I would have to say probably for myself, people in other parts of the world that didn't have that same friendly awareness in my mind. And I wasn't aware of them as friends and associates and so forth. That was a consideration.
What I particularly learned, though, in 1969, and from the Pentagon Papers, was that Nixon, the fifth president in a row now, was choosing to prolong the war in vain hopes that he might get a better outcome than he could achieve if he'd just negotiated his way out and took what he could get and accepted, essentially, a defeat. He hoped to do much better than that. In fact, he hoped to hold on to control of Saigon and the major populated areas indefinitely for the United States, that these would be subject to our will and our policy and not be run by communists. And he hoped to do that, actually, in ways similar to the way Johnson had hoped -- by threatening escalation of the war, threatening bombing of North Vietnam. He was making such threats and then he was prepared to carry them out.
I did not believe the threats would succeed, so I foresaw a larger war. He was fooling the public about what he was doing at this time for the same reason Johnson had in 1964. The public would not, at that time, have supported a continuation of the war, let alone an expansion of the war. But he was successfully fooling the public, who didn't want to believe that any president could be so foolish and so narrow minded in his own interests as to keep that war going after the Tet offensive of 1968. So I saw a replay of 1964 and 1965 coming again. I saw once again a president making secret threats, almost sure to carry them out, and deceiving the public as to what he was doing.
By reading the Pentagon Papers, which I finished doing in the fall of 1969, in September 1969, I now had a historical sweep sufficient to reach a conclusion that I would have been very unlikely to reach without reading them, and that was that there was very little hope of changing his [the president's] mind from inside the executive branch, for example, by giving him good advice or by giving him realistic estimates of what was happening in Vietnam. Because what I saw by reading the earliest days of the Pentagon Papers, going back to 1945 and 1946, was that every president had had such advice, as early as Truman. Truman had seen predictions of an indefinitely prolonged guerrilla war facing him and yet had gone ahead in supporting the French in this effort. And this had happened year after year. It happened year after year for Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson. The fact now that Nixon was embarked on a new course held out very little hope that he would be more responsive just to good advice about getting out than any of his predecessors had been.
<h3>That meant that if his decision was going to be changed -- and because I cared about Vietnam and this country, I felt quite urgently that I wanted the United States to stop bombing them and stop killing Vietnamese -- the pressure would have to come from outside the executive branch.</h3> It would involve a variety of things, but it probably required better information outside the executive branch, in Congress and in the public, about the past and about the present, than they had. If I had had documents on what Nixon was planning, on what I'd been told he was planning by colleagues who were working for Nixon, I would have put those out at that time to Congress to warn them of what was coming. I probably would not have bothered with the thousands of pages of history that involved the earlier presidents; <h3>I would have shown what Nixon was doing. But I didn't have those documents. And at that time, it was very hard to get the public to believe or to act on the possibility that a president was lying to them or deceiving them.</h3> That was not in the American consciousness, and it was a very unpopular notion even to put forward.
<h3>I once said in a courtroom, in defense of people who were on trial for resisting the draft, that the president had lied.</h3> This was in early 1971, before the Pentagon Papers had come out. The judge stopped the proceedings, called the lawyers up to the bench. I could hear what he was saying because I was in the witness box next to him. "If you elicit testimony like that again," he said to the defense lawyer, <h3>"I will hold you in contempt. I will not have statements about the president lying in my courtroom." This was in a trial of people who were resisting the war nonviolently. And they weren't allowed, in effect, to have witnesses who said anything like that, that the president was lying. The Pentagon Papers changed that.</h3> Seven thousand pages of documents of presidential lying did establish forever, and they were confirmed of course by Watergate a couple of years later, that presidents all lie.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/peo...sberg98-7.html
Morality and Risk
<h3>You mentioned your awareness of what was happening to the Vietnamese people, you mentioned your awareness of what Nixon was contemplating doing but which you couldn't talk about.
Were you also affected by the demonstrators and the moral positions that they advocated?</h3>
Less so by the demonstrators, actually, than by people that I'd met who were paying a much higher price in their lives to make a very strong message than people who were in a demonstration. People who were going to jail rather than go to the draft and Vietnam, and rather than go to Canada or become conscientious objectors or go in the National Guard like Clinton made an effort to do, and so forth, or Quayle or others. They had a number of options to avoid combat in Vietnam, including being a conscientious objector. But they chose, actually, to make the strongest statement that you could that the war was wrong, that it should end, and that they would not cooperate with it in any way, even by accepting CO status. And they accepted prison as a result.
I met one in particular named Randall Keeler in late August of 1969, and when I understood to my amazement that he was on his way to prison shortly, that he was about to be tried for draft resistance and expected to go to prison, where he did go for two years, it had a shattering effect on me to realize that we were in a situation where men as attractive in their intelligence and commitment as Randy Keeler found that the best thing they could do was to accept prison to try to raise a moral issue to their countrymen. And I realized that was the best thing he could do. He was doing the right thing and that defined the situation we were in. What a terrible situation! I felt that we were eating our young. Like cannibals -- or worse than cannibals: we were eating our own children. We were relying on them to pay the price for somehow getting us out of this war, sacrificing them like canon fodder in the war itself. And they should be joined by people who were willing to do what they were doing, and that was do everything that one could, truthfully and nonviolently. These were Gandhians in effect. And I had by this time, it so happens, been reading Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and now I was meeting people who had been living the life that I'd been reading about. And with the constraints, then, of truthfulness and nonviolence, I realized that following their example I was prepared to do anything I could, and that meant giving up a career and meant going to prison.
So I asked myself for the first time, what could I do to help end the war if I were willing to go to prison? Now it wasn't at all clear that putting out the Pentagon Papers, which I thought would send me to prison, would be one of the better things I could do. It was history. It didn't prove what Nixon was about to do; it only suggested that he might do the same as all these other presidents. And I was trying a number of other paths that looked more promising. They were less dangerous, but more importantly they looked more powerful. I was trying to arrange that I could testify before Congress. I was trying to get hearings started. I was participating with others in writing letters from Rand. It's a small measure, but it was an unusual thing for people in the Rand Corporation working with the government to say bluntly that we should get out of Vietnam. It was, in fact, a rather powerful move, as such things went. More promising than putting out the Pentagon Papers, actually.....
<h3>Any other factors that can help us understand? I'm interested here in a kind of inner strength; it's not the easiest choice to make for any individual.</h3>
No, good questions really. It so happens I've been thinking about this recently because of something I'm writing. So some thoughts have even come into my head just recently that I wouldn't have pressed as much before. I mentioned reading the Pentagon Papers, which was crucial to my understanding of what needed to be done, and that was [to exert] pressure from outside the executive branch, and I'll get to the point you just raised in just a moment. Another point, though, was that reading the Pentagon Papers burned out of me the desire to work for the president. I saw five presidents in a row, now including Nixon, who had been mistaken in this stubborn, selfish, foolish way year after year after year for what was, at this point now, twenty-four years.
The idea that I'd had since I was a boy, and that most Americans had, was to get the opportunity to work for the president. (We talk about growing up to be president but not many of us, other than Clinton, who is a rare example, had this seriously in his mind.) When I was a marine lieutenant, I already thought of myself as working for the president because the marines tended to think of themselves as a fast reaction force that was at the president's disposal, kind of a presidential guard......
<h3>Reading the Pentagon Papers and reflecting on Vietnam revealed to me, first of all, that presidents could go terribly wrong despite the best advice they could get, and that therefore the best way of helping the country was not necessarily helping the president do what he wanted to do, because the best way might be keeping him from doing what he wanted to do. And that had to be done outside the executive branch, by Congress, by courts, by voters, by the public. So that actually, you could do more for the country outside the executive branch.</h3>
....I no longer wanted to be a president's man. The idea of life outside the executive, I think, suddenly had a possibility for me, or alternatively, it looked just as good or better than working for a president......
...They can conceive of leaving a particular president. They can't conceive of doing something that would keep future presidents from relying on them or trusting them or calling them in again. So that was crucial.
And finally, we come to the point that one of the things I was doing -- by the way, pretty much everything I was doing in terms of working with Congress was compromising my ability ever to work for a president again. That was going too far. But one thing I was doing was likely to put me in prison; in fact, I thought, certain to put me in prison. How could I do that?
Actually, I'd been in the marine corps, I'd been in Vietnam, I'd been in combat. Three million men who went to Vietnam as soldiers exposed themselves to losing their legs, their bodies, their lives to a mine or to a sniper, or to a mortar round. And they were not regarded as heroes just because they accepted that role, or crazy. Nobody did a psychiatric profile on them, as was done on me, to ask why did they do that? They were doing it for the president or for the country. The president, however, was who decided what was good for the country. He was deciding very badly. And not just he, but five of them, were deciding very badly here and that wasn't even too hard to see. But you did what the president said, what he wanted you to do. And to do that is sensible, as you say rational, even if it involves your death, even if it involves your killing people, in what is in fact a bad cause. A bad cause by any other standard but the fact that the president has endorsed it. And this was a bad cause.
So dying, killing in a bad cause, all of that is regarded as very reasonable. And I had done it. I had been over there. Even when I didn't believe in the cause I served the president. I was learning from the inside about the government. I had various reasons, which didn't seem, in retrospect, good enough to justify what I was doing. But that's what I was doing. And the point was that what Randy Keeler revealed to me was that there were other ways of being conscientious than serving the president. There are other kinds of courage. And I had to ask myself, well, if I was willing to be blown up in Vietnam or captured, as friends of mine were, when I accepted the cause or supported it, should I not be willing to go to prison or risk my freedom? And when I faced that question, it was quickly answered.
When you ask me how could I be willing to face that, I was the kind of guy who had been willing to go to Vietnam. That didn't make me unique. It put me not with everybody in the country but with a lot of people. Oliver Stone had volunteered to go to Vietnam remember, as did lots of other people. The connection, however, that not many of them had occasion to make was between doing that sort of thing and making the same kind of commitment against the president's will and policy, against what he wanted to do, against what he was demanding. And to put yourself in the position of a dissenter, or of, let's say, a congressman who opposed the war.
So, one shift was from the executive branch to helping the Congress and working in the public. A major shift of identity very, very difficult for an executive official to make. Another one, of course, was a willingness actually to go to prison for what I was doing. And that was because I made the connection with what I myself had done in Vietnam or in the marines. But I wouldn't have done that without the example of thousands of Americans. Actually, Esquire magazine called me just last month. They're doing an issue on heroes and they asked me if I would say if I had a hero that I wanted to name. And I mentioned Randy Keeler as a person who had changed my life by his example.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/peo...sberg98-8.html
The Responsibility of the Insider
<h3>What then, briefly, is the responsibility of an individual in a democracy on matters of war and peace like we've been discussing?</h>
....Any of those executive officials, I'll take McNamara as an example, could have or could in the future, in a situation like Iran - Contra for example, think of informing Congress, with or without the approval of the president. They would do this, by the way, with almost no legal risk. There are many ways they could do this with no legal liability. In fact, to the contrary, it often involves simply telling the truth instead of committing perjury, which is what they actually do do. So it involves obeying the law rather than violating the law, and obeying the Constitution. But it's in a way that they hardly think of doing because it involves crossing the man who appointed them. They could then, take McNamara, could have encouraged hearings by Fulbright, could have told him what questions to ask, could have provided witnesses for him. Could have testified himself truthfully instead of falsely under oath, which is what he did do, and could have provided the Pentagon Papers in a timely fashion. Could have given him the documents, told him what documents to ask for. In short, work with Congress to change the situation. That's a very powerful and very practical way, which almost nobody ever dreams of doing. It would certainly keep them from ever being hired by a future Republican or Democratic president. But, as I say, there is life outside the executive branch.
Second, they really could conceive of taking risks with their own career that are comparable to the risks they routinely ask of draftees and volunteers that they are sending to war. They could contemplate, in other words, paying a price in their own lives by telling the truth, by informing the public, by acting conscientiously, in a committed way, outside the executive branch to tell the truth, to inform the public. Again, at great cost to their future careers but a cost that they should be willing to pay. In short, they would find that they had much more power as individuals than they imagine they have if they were willing to pay a price in their own lives.
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Last edited by host; 12-09-2007 at 05:21 PM..
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