This article was originally published in Brandon R. Rudenstine, David. Berkeley: University of California Press, Schrag, Peter. New York: Simon and Schuster, McDuffee, Allen. At his trial, Mr Ellsberg was not able to argue that he leaked the Pentagon Papers in the public interest.
This argument was irrelevant, the judge ruled, because the act provides no such defence, which is often invoked by journalists. Without that defence, Mr Ellsberg said, government whistleblowers like him "can't get a fair trial". To avoid long jail terms, most defendants strike plea deals, thus waiving their right to appeal. We need more whistleblowers, not fewer," Mr Ellsberg said. If he were to be prosecuted for a second time, Mr Ellsberg would take a different approach.
There would be no plea bargains, no shadow boxing with the White House. If I'm found guilty on the precedent of previous cases, I think it should go to the Supreme Court. This would be uncharted territory for the Department of Justice, whose use of the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers has never been addressed by the Supreme Court. Given this, Mr Ellsberg said the administration of US President Joe Biden would "be reluctant to bring this case against me", because it would bring attention to the unauthorised disclosure of classified material by a year-old.
They have a real chance of losing," he said. So far, appeals against Espionage Act convictions of this kind have fallen short in lower courts. Noting this, Mr Timm said he expected an "uphill battle" for anybody who sought to challenge the constitutionality of prosecutions under the act, even if some Supreme Court justices were sympathetic to free-speech arguments. Should he end up fighting this battle, Mr Ellsberg has already made peace with the hazards of exposing state secrets.
Even at the age of 90, some things are worth making sacrifices for, Mr Ellsberg said. Vietnam War papers released in US. US surveillance: Security leaks that shook the world. William Fulbright, but none was willing to make them public or hold hearings about them. When the Times was slapped with an injunction ordering a stop to publication, Ellsberg provided the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and then to 15 other newspapers.
The case, entitled New York Times Co. The United States, ultimately went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which on June 30, , issued a landmark decision authorizing the newspapers to print the Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure. Not specifically because Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers—which covered only the period up to and therefore did not implicate the Nixon administration—but rather because they feared, incorrectly, that Ellsberg possessed documents concerning Nixon's secret plans to escalate the Vietnam War including contingency plans involving the use of nuclear weapons , Nixon and Kissinger embarked on a fanatical campaign to discredit him.
An FBI agent named G. Lewis Fielding, searching for materials with which to blackmail Ellsberg. Similar "dirty tricks" by "the Plumbers" eventually led to Nixon's downfall in the Watergate scandal. For leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case was dismissed as a mistrial when evidence surfaced about the government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins.
Ever since his leak of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg has remained active as a scholar and antiwar, anti-nuclear weapons activist. He has authored three books: Papers on the War , Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision as well as countless articles on economics, foreign policy and nuclear disarmament. In , he received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," "for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.
When he chose to leak the Pentagon Papers in , many people both within and outside the government derided him as a traitor and suspected him of espionage. Since that time, however, many have come to regard Daniel Ellsberg as hero of uncommon bravery, a man who risked his career and even his personal freedom to help expose the deception of his own government in carrying out the Vietnam War. The debate surrounding Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers has recently regained international attention as historical context for the debate over the decision of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables from U.
But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war.
The New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday. The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from to , revealed that president after president knew the war to be unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an escalating stalemate costing millions of lives. After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced a potential prison sentence of years, only for the charges to be dropped.
So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? In the mids he was there on special assignment as a civilian studying counter-insurgency for the state department. He estimates that he and a friend drove about 10, miles, visiting 38 of the 43 provinces, sometimes linking up with troops and witnessing the war up close.
And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out. In fact, most of them had never met a Vietnamese. Only recently, as he prepares for the 50th anniversary, has Ellsberg dwelled on how doubts about the war went higher in the political hierarchy than is widely understood. In particular, a very large range of high-level doves thought we should get out and should not have got involved at all.
They were lying to the public to give the impression that they were supporting the president when they did not believe in what the president was doing.
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