Where are Iraq's Pentagon Papers?
By Daniel Ellsberg
The Boston Globe
Sunday 22 February 2004
As more and more of our young men and women come home from Iraq crippled
or in body bags this election season, Americans ask, with increasing
urgency, "Why did we send our children to die in Iraq? Was this war
necessary?"
Indeed, Tim Russert asked the president precisely that on "Meet the Press"
a few weeks ago: "In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction,
do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?"
President Bush replied "It's a war of necessity. . . . the man was a
threat. . . . the evidence we have uncovered so far says we had no choice."
To the contrary. The evidence uncovered so far says that Saddam was not a
threat, to us or his neighbors. Nor -- lacking any evidence of complicity in
9/11 or links to Al Qaeda -- was there a persuasive case that he would have
been a significant threat even if he had possessed WMDs.
In order to bolster their arguments and gain congressional, public, and
international support, high officials chose to conceal the fact that their
belief in the existence of Iraqi WMDs was entirely inferential, reflecting
flimsy evidence and testimony from sources whose reliability was highly
controversial. This actual state of inadequate information, well known to the
US and British intelligence community, was deliberately denied by the highest
officials in repeated phrases such as, "we know . . . ," "bulletproof
evidence," "beyond any doubt," "Saddam possesses. . . ," "British intelligence
has learned," and "these are not assertions, these are facts." The euphemism
for such descriptions of the strength of evidence favoring the need to go to
war is "exaggeration." A more accurate term is "lies."
I've been here before. On my first full-time day of work as a high-level staff
aide in the Pentagon, Aug. 4, 1964, I heard President Johnson and Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara explain our first bombing raids against North Vietnam
as a response to "unequivocal evidence" of an "unprovoked" attack on our
destroyers "on routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf. Already that night I knew,
along with many other Pentagon insiders, that each of these statements was a
lie.
"Unequivocal"? I had personally read, 10 hours before our bombers were
launched, a "Flash" cable from Captain Herrick, commanding the destroyers,
which put in doubt all of his cables that had crossed my desk earlier that day
reporting up to 21 torpedoes fired at his ships. Attributing the prior reports
to "freak weather effects and an overeager sonarman," Herrick recommended that
no further action be taken till there had been complete evaluation, including
daylight reconnaissance.
Congress was given no hint of this recommendation (which his superiors ignored)
or the uncertainties emphasized by Herrick, in the top secret testimony it
received from McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk before it passed the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution three days later with only two dissenting votes. In
hearings in February 1968, Senator J. William Fulbright said that if he had
known of the Herrick cable alone, he would not have managed the Senate passage
of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, "a great disservice to the Senate" which he
regretted "more than anything I have ever done in my life."
He hadn't known of that cable because I, among many others, didn't tell him. I
didn't dream of doing such a thing at the time; and if the thought had occurred
to me, I'm sure I would have rejected it. Now I wish fervently that I had made
those cables -- along with the rest of the contents of my safe in August 1964,
demonstrating the equal falsity of the other statements about "unprovoked"
attacks, "routine patrols," and "we seek no wider war" -- available to Congress
and the electorate that same autumn, before the bombs had started falling. When
I finally did so belatedly in 1971, former Senator Wayne Morse, who had cast
one of the two dissenting votes in 1964, told me that if I had given him those
documents at that time, "The Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out
of committee. And if it had been brought to a vote, it would never have
passed." That's a heavy burden to bear.
However, just as Senators Byrd and Kennedy, the only two remaining in the
Senate who voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, learned from an error they
have regretted for almost 40 years and tried to warn their current colleagues
against repeating it last fall, so can insiders such as I once was do better
than I did then. Individuals inside government, from low-level clerks to
Cabinet members, have the power -- to be sure, at the risk of their careers --
to tell the truth. There are surely drawers full of documents in Washington
right now -- the Pentagon Papers of Iraq -- that, if leaked in bulk, would
drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should have sent our
children to kill and to die in Iraq, and more urgently, whether we should
continue to do so.
I urge patriotic and conscientious Americans who have access to these
documents, and who know it is wrong for their bosses to lie to the public about
why we are in this war, to consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or
early 1965, years earlier than I did: Go to Congress and the press; tell the
truth, with documents. The personal risks are real, but a war's worth of lives
are at stake.
Wednesday 25 February 2004
) : t r u t h o u t 2004
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