By Lawrence Davidson

Daniel Ellsberg’s farewell message

In the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg worked for the US State Department. It was at this post that he gained access to the “Pentagon Papers” – 7,000 pages of “top secret” documents on the history of US involvement in Vietnam. It showed in great detail how the government had spent decades lying to the American public in order to sustain an ultimately unwindable war. After some hesitancy, Ellsberg decided that this amounted to the history of mass murder and decided to leak the information to the press. By doing so, he risked life in prison.

Shortly before he died on 16 June 2023, at the age of 92, Ellsberg recorded a farewell message. In that message he confessed that he had delayed for several years before he made public the official lying about Vietnam: “not just your ordinary lies about cost overruns but lies that were killing people – these lies were about [trying to hide] crimes and sins and evil that should [have been] stop[ped] immediately”. Thus, he said to those who would hear his words, “Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait till the bombs are falling and thousands more have died. Act… like I wish I had done in 1964, when I knew that people were being lied to death.Put out documents to that effect before the war, at whatever cost to oneself, at whatever risk.”

Snowden, Assange, Manning and others

Ellsberg has always served as a role model for others with the awareness and courage to make public the state’s deadly deceits. In his final message, he applauded some of them, “in particular, Ed Snowden and Julian Assange.”

June 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s flight into exile. Snowden was also a civilian employee of the US government, in this case working for the National Security Agency (NSA). After the attacks on 9 November 2001, the NSA was assigned the job of intercepting communications that might prevent another onslaught. The result was an unregulated, runaway programme that would lead to mass spying on American citizens. Snowden expressed his reservations to his superiors, but this went nowhere. Finally, in 2013 he met journalists in a small hotel room in Hong Kong and turned over to them tens of thousands of top secret documents detailing the NSA’s spying project. At that point, facing 30 years in prison, he fled into exile in Russia. 

In both the cases of Ellsberg and Snowden, the US government failed in its efforts to imprison the whistleblower. However, not for lack of trying. Ellsberg’s case fell apart due to the illegal methods used by the Nixon administration when gathering  evidence against him – their agents broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. As noted above, Snowden fled into exile. However, in the recent past there have been less fortunate truth-tellers. In 2015 Daniel Hale, an air force intelligence officer was sentenced to 45 months in prison for revealing the US use of unmanned drones against what were often civilian targets. Then in 2010, Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst serving in Iraq, was appalled by the reports she had access to and ended up giving literally hundreds of thousands of secret documents to the internet site, WikiLeaks. The documents “revealed wrongdoing by military officials – including the wanton deaths of Iraqi civilians – as well as the sloppy, disorganised nature of war”. Manning was arrested by army investigators and subsequently held in solitary confinement for extended periods of time before being sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in January 2017.

Manning had sent the copied documents to WikiLeaks, which was organised and run by Julian Assange. Assange and WikiLeaks published Manning’s disclosures “in partnership with five newspapers”. Soon thereafter, the US government charged Assange with espionage and has sought to extradite him from England, where he is held in a high security prison. That extradition is now considered imminent. 

The usual context

A generic definition of “whistleblower” runs as follows: “a person who informs on another or makes public disclosure of corruption, wrongdoing, problems or secret information, especially within an organisation”. There are several things to note here: (1) Much of what whistleblowers reveal is illegal, immoral, or otherwise bad – “wrongdoing” and “corruption” of one sort or another. (2) At the level we are considering the word “organisation” comes into play. This could be a corporation, civic or religious institution, or a government. As we will see, such organisations have embedded within them a rationalising culture, and a reinforcing ethic, perhaps a certain level of secrecy, and an expectation of loyalty. For the average member of such organisations, the pressure to be, if you will, “a good soldier” can be stronger than their personal sense of right and wrong. (3) In the case of states and their major sub-parts, there exists enough power to make most forms of corruption and immorality legal under specific circumstances, and turn the public disclosure of these acts into a crime. In other words, publicly call something like mass murder by a government agency a crime and you become the criminal. (4) The public often holds a conflicted attitude toward whistleblowers. Most people have been taught since childhood that “informing on another” is not the proper thing to do. Yet, at this level of consideration, the act of informing is almost always in the public interest. 

The conversion factor

The whistleblowers who break with the organisational culture of their workplaces to reveal criminal behaviour are special people. They are special in two connected ways: (1) Their personal sense of right and wrong is sufficiently engrained so as not to be overwritten by the organisation’s competing standards and accompanying rationalisations – even when it is claimed that the organisation’s behaviour is necessary or supposedly a special case. (2) In the long run, their personal sense of what is right proves stronger than any expectation of loyalty or patriotism inherent in the organisation’s culture. In other words, in these cases, groupthink fails to convert the individual to its way of seeing and acting in the world. 

However, this is clearly not the standard way things usually play out. For every whistleblower there are literally millions of individuals who just carry on – the ubiquitous cogs in the wheel. Yet, there is an even more sinister problem here. An organisation can capture the “good person” – converting an individual who appears to have all the right principles deeply rooted into one willingly complicit in criminal behaviour. Government and military organizations depend on this conversion factor. It is a key element in assuring loyalty.

An interesting example of the conversion factor can be seen with president Barack Obama. On the one hand, Obama was someone with humane values: he was a community organiser in Chicago and a civil rights lawyer. He sought to spread those values as a teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. As president he passed the Affordable Care Act and normalised relations with Iran and Cuba. In line with this liberal orientation, he also claimed that his administration was “the most transparent administration in history”. He claimed that “I can document that this is the case. Every visitor that comes into the White House is now part of the public record. Every law we pass and every rule we implement we put online for everyone to see.” Of course, he added, there are “a handful of issues, mostly surrounding national security,” that require confidentiality.

Where Obama fell from liberal grace and became converted to bureaucratic standards that opened his way to criminal action was by accepting a sweeping, open-ended, definition of national security, and thus what had to be kept secret. In doing so he surrendered to a longstanding category of bureaucratic groupthink.  

The statutes defining “secret” and “top secret” for material relating to “national security” say that these tags are to be used “with the utmost restraint” and “sparingly”. Yet the number of secret and top secret documents relating to the Iraq War, released to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in January 2010, was over 400,000 (out of a total of 750,000). How could all of these, indeed the vast majority of these documents, qualify for some secret status? On review, it turned out that they could not. According to a subsequent Pentagon report, the disclosures “will have no direct impact” and/or “no strategic impact” on the ongoing conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor were any American or allied lives lost directly due to the disclosures. However, the authors of the same report did express a concern “about the impact of adverse media publicity accruing from the leak. In particular, they were anxious about media attention on the large number of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who were being injured or killed in the US war effort”.

It is unlikely that President Obama asked the question whether the more or less arbitrary classification of hundreds of thousands of documents made nonsense of his claim to transparency. This is probably because he assumed the classification process was an inherent necessity when it came to “national security”.

Conclusion

Censorship in the name of national security is a process run wild. It supplies a “legal” cover for crimes ranging from arbitrary cruelty to mass murder. Whistleblowers, having maintained a mindset independent of their organisational setting come to recognise this coverup and, perhaps after a period of internal turmoil, go public with the data. They do so with the hope that, as Chelsea Manning put it, “to trigger worldwide discussion, debates and reforms,” adding: “I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” 

Unfortunately, the history of such disclosures suggest that most of the public are not sensitive to the actions of whistleblowers, though they are sensitive to body bags and relatives with missing limbs and PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Maybe the next step should be an attempt to explicitly tie together these issues. The government certainly fears “adverse media publicity” and so whistleblowers and their supporters need to clearly show the connections between the stark confessional nature of leaked documents and the brutal consequences of policy. It should be noted that among all of Manning’s leaked documents, it was the video of an American helicopter gun crew killing Iraqi civilians that caused the most reaction from the minority of folks who paid attention to the WikiLeaks revelations.  

None of this is likely to help Julian Assange – a major whistleblower target of the US government. His extradition to the US is probably imminent and, without a significant public outcry (something that is not likely), he will be crucified for revealing the truth. As suggested, the men and women in power in Washington have the ability to make criminal behaviour legal and its public outing illegal. Truth is thus debased by institutions most people trust. For providing a moment when this is plain to see, at least for those who care to look, all these whistleblowers deserve to be acknowledged as heroes rather than condemned as disloyal and imprisoned.