WASHINGTON, 16 February 2003 — Almost 30 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine company commander who served in Vietnam, risked life in prison by leaking 7,000 pages of Pentagon documents that exposed a long-list of lies and duplicity on the part of the US government.
Called “The Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg is credited for significantly helping to bring the war in Vietnam to an end. Viewed by many as the most important whistle-blower of the past half-century, Ellsberg is now taking aim at the current US administration.
“Our civilian leaders are leading us into the war in Iraq just as aggressively as LBJ did in Vietnam,” Ellsberg told Arab News in a phone interview, just before leaving for yesterday’s anti-war rally in New York.
“In this case, the world is not being deceived about the likelihood of the war, the president has made no secret he wants this war, as did LBJ in 1964.”
Ellsberg said the reasons for war being given by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “are not just unfounded, but in many cases absurd.”
He slammed the notion that Saddam Hussein represents an imminent danger to the US, insisting the real threats are Al-Qaeda and North Korea. “Our own CIA told the Senate that they could find no credible link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.”
“This is a world where tens of thousands of Russian nuclear weapons are very poorly guarded and can provide abundant black market resources of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and rogue states.”
Ellsberg said the administration is ignoring this fact and “absurdly” cut funding to Russia to guard and protect these weapons.
“This shows a very low concern with nuclear proliferation,” he said. “This is very urgently true in the case of North Korea where we have a country that already has nuclear weapons and is close to developing weapons grade plutonium which it could easily sell to Al-Qaeda, just as they sold nuclear weapons to Pakistan.”
“Iraq does not have nuclear weapons, so the source of weapons to Al-Qaeda could only come from a covert supply from Pakistan, North Korea or the Russian black market,” said Ellsberg, “which means Iraq poses no real danger to US national security at this time.”
Asked about the US administration’s obsession with Iraq, Ellsberg answered: “North Korea has no oil, but represents a significant danger to world peace which cannot be resolved by military action.”
Asked why, at the age of 72, he was attending yesterday’s rally, he said: “Because each person in that crowd is going to be counted by U-2s,” he said. “It’s important to our show our solidarity with millions of people demonstrating worldwide today.” Ellsberg said there is a “small chance” that today’s worldwide protest “could actually tame this rogue administration, which is prepared to wage a war against the clear wishes of the UN.”
