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Friday, Oct 10, 2008
The man who sparked Watergate, Daniel Ellsberg, has deja vu watching the Bush administration try to spin the Plame leak.
Oct 3, 2003 | Watching the Valerie Plame scandal unfold, Daniel Ellsberg has dij` vu. In 1971, Ellsberg became the most famous leaker in American history with his release of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, a Defense Department study of the country's sordid involvement in Indochina. Besides revealing the lies and hypocrisy of American policy in a war its leaders knew was futile, Ellsberg's leak led Nixon to create the plumbers, the dirty tricks squad that broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office looking for information to discredit him. Nixon's henchmen would use similar tactics against Democratic opponents, leading to the Watergate scandal and the president's downfall.
Today, Ellsberg says, America is in the early stages of a similar crisis. Once again, he says, the country is embroiled in a foreign war for murky reasons. Once again, he says, the White House has justified its policy with lies, and is smearing a whistle-blower who exposed those lies.
By now, the outlines of the new scandal are familiar. Last year, former ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson was dispatched to Niger to investigate claims that that country had sold uranium to Iraq. Even though Wilson determined that the allegation was groundless, George Bush used it to bolster his case for war in his State of the Union address. In July, months after the fall of Baghdad, Wilson went public in a New York Times Op-Ed. Shortly after, according to the Washington Post, two administration officials told columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative, blowing her cover. Wilson sees the leak as both an attempt to discredit him by suggesting he was only sent to Niger because of nepotism and as a warning from the White House that exposing administration mendacity can kill a career. As the scandal has grown hotter, conservatives have expressed bafflement and disbelief. But it's nothing new to Ellsberg.
A former Marine lieutenant and Harvard Ph.D., he worked on Vietnam policy in the Defense Department under Secretary Robert McNamara. In the preface to his 2002 book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," he writes of having watched America's leaders "maneuver the country into a full-scale war with no real promise of success." When he came forward, Nixon's plumbers took dangerous risks to undermine him, risks that can hardly be explained by rational political calculations. Ellsberg has seen firsthand that even among the savviest people, secrecy and vindictiveness can have a logic of their own.
At 72, Ellsberg despairs watching an administration whose malevolence he believes far exceeds that of his old foes on the Nixon team. His hope, he says, is that history continues its repetition, and that the White House's attempts to destroy its domestic enemies finally leads to its own destruction.
Do you see parallels between your experiences with the Pentagon Papers and what's happening to Joseph Wilson and his wife?
I see an almost identical pattern here. Really, I don't know of any analogy so close in the 30 years between now and then. This is not an everyday occurrence.
The origins of Watergate was an unauthorized disclosure by me that demonstrated a succession of presidential lies in a war that was still going on, lies that had lied us into war, exactly as in Iraq. In that case, that panicked the White House into fear that the leaker, in that case myself, would be imitated by others who would reveal information directly on Nixon, as I had not yet done -- the Pentagon Papers themselves ended in 1968, before Nixon came into office. He feared that I had more information on him that I would reveal.
Wilson of course did reveal his own work under Bush. His revelation gave the lie to Bush's own statement [about Iraq's nuclear program]. The White House undoubtedly fears that Wilson had more information that he could put out and above all that others would be led by seeing what a worthwhile effort this was, to tell the truth about the president's lies, and be moved to follow his example. To deter them, the White House has clearly been led to set up a project to discredit him and to punish him in ways that will deter others from following his example, and in the course of that they're willing to take criminal actions. It's an exact reproduction of the effort under [Nixon aides] Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman and Egil Krogh, Jr.
What I'm saying, then, is the plumbers are back.
Isn't there a difference, though? This administration is being accused of illegal leaking, and it may be that only two officials were involved. The plumbers were an organized group that committed crimes to staunch leaks.
The original plumbers operated by planning to leak. Their main operation was leaking. They went into my former psychoanalyst's office, they listened to me on warrantless wiretaps in order either to leak that information or to threaten me with leaks. In this case, they're sort of threatening other people by punishing Wilson. He said it was done to intimidate him. What does that mean? If they would not only break the law, but violate national security in order to punish him, it's a clear signal they'll do anything. There's no limit to what they'll put out.
What Valerie Plame was involved in was in the interests of the United States. She was involved in secret activity to find out about weapons proliferation. Let's assume she was trying to inhibit the spread of nuclear weapons. This was a necessary activity and one that the government has chosen to jeopardize by vindictively exposing.
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