Daniel Ellsberg Was Right. So Are Assange And Snowden...
_Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,_ (https://mises.org/wire/daniel-ellsberg-was-right-so-are-assange-and-snowden)
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, and he remains one of the nation's most prominent whistleblowers who leaked secret government information to the public. Upon his death the general consensus among the writers of memorials for Ellsberg was that he was right to leak government secrets. As the editorial board at _The Orange County Register_ recently put it (https://www.ocregister.com/2023/06/22/rip-daniel-ellsberg-a-true-american-hero/), he was **"a true American hero."**
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)They're right about Ellsberg. During the Vietnam War, through his release of the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971, Ellsberg made public a large trove of secret government documents that exposed many of the Federal government's lies about its involvement throughout Indochina. Much of the information applied to the Johnson Administration which had been lying about the war to _both_ the public and the Congress. Naturally, the release of this information, which smashed the Federal government's credibility on foreign policy, also called into question countless claims about the Nixon Administration. Nixon, of course, had already authorized an illegal and secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969.
**At the time, the response to Ellsberg's deeds was hardly one of universal acclaim. Yet, over time, criticism has waned and Ellsberg's critics have been exposed for what they were: knee-jerk defenders of a regime devoted to war crimes and crimes against the Bill of Rights.**
In fact, it has become so difficult to criticize Ellsberg that defenders of today's regime have had to devise ways to claim that Ellsberg's leaks were heroic, but the leaks by more recent whistleblowers—such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden—have been traitorous. The fact that Ellsberg himself always supported leakers like Snowden and Assange is studiously ignored.
Yet, what was true for leakers in 1971 remains true today: **it is heroic to expose the lies of governments, and those who seek to jail truthtellers are the _real_ criminals** who choose to protect state power at the expense of freedom and basic human rights.
**The Original Response to Ellsberg's Leak**
It does not require any courage or independent thinking to support Daniel Ellsberg in 2023. To do so is to do what is already accepted and popular. This is why journalists almost universally support Ellsberg today. It's easy.
Yet, to support modern-day Ellsbergs—such as Assange, Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and Jack Texeira—requires some degree of independent thought, skepticism, and disregard for the regime. This is why so few journalists in the corporate media support these modern-day leakers. To do so might endanger journalists' positions with the organs of power within mainstream media. Moreover, most corporate journalists are firmly on the side of the regime. They have no interest whatsoever in undermining it.
Indeed, many journalists at the time of the release of the Pentagon Papers condemned Ellsberg. For example (https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/12/one-eras-traitor-is-another-eras-whistle-blower/), at the 1971 meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association a speaker insisted that approval of Ellsberg is akin to approval of any "pamphleteer" who publishes "a plan of a secret submarine or a list of foreign agents abroad, obtained from any peddler of secrets." The editors of TIME magazine, meanwhile, reminded (https://books.google.com/books?id=OUAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=%22daniel%20ellsberg%22&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false) readers that the federal government ought to use the "remedy" of prosecuting whistleblowers if publishing secrets might "endanger national security." The editors fail to mention that the federal government itself gets to determine what the amorphous phrase "national security" actually means.
Politicians, of course, freely attacked Ellsberg with that term that is forever a favored refuge of the simple-minded: "traitor (https://mises.org/wire/there-no-such-thing-treason)." The Nixon Administration prosecuted him under the Espionage Act of 1917. Ellsberg himself suspected he would spend the rest of his life in jail, but he escaped conviction thanks to the administrative incompetence of Nixon's "Plumbers." The Nixon Administration had already violated so many of Ellsberg's basic procedural rights in the lead up to the trial that no court would side with the administration. Ultimately, however, it must be noted that the Supreme Court took no action to meaningfully limit the Espionage Act. The Court to…
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/daniel-ellsberg-was-right-so-are-assange-and-snowden